Whole Cloth

Following up on a post regarding the canard that deregulation is what we need around here to get businesses on their feet, here's a piece by the newly-confirmed Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Economic Policy:

In the September survey of small business owners by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, more than twice as many respondents cited poor sales (29.6 percent) as their largest problem than cite regulation (13.9 percent).

In an August survey of economists by the National Association for Business Economics, 80 percent of respondents described the current regulatory environment as “good” for American businesses and the overall economy.

As noted above, in a recent Wall Street Journal survey of economists, 65 percent of respondents concluded that a lack demand, not government policy, was the main impediment to increased hiring.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than three-tenths of 1 percent of mass lay-offs in the second quarter of this year were due to government regulations or intervention. [2]

The article also includes a graph which demonstrates the identical ups and downs of markets in the US and Germany, which would suggest (I'll take her word for it) that it's not about imposition of particular regulations, but about universal market forces:

Okay, I'll admit I can't bring much knowledge to bear on that graph; but it doesn't seem too challenging: another central economic argument of teabaggRs is, like the rest of their claims, simply made up out of whole cloth. (I've always wondered from where that expression came.)

If it's hard to understand graphs, there's always reality (as if teabaggRs care about such things):

Obama’s White House has approved fewer regulations than his predecessor George W. Bush at this same point in their tenures, and the estimated costs of those rules haven’t reached the annual peak set in fiscal 1992 under Bush’s father, according to government data reviewed by Bloomberg News. […]

Obama’s White House approved 613 federal rules during the first 33 months of his term, 4.7 percent fewer than the 643 cleared by President George W. Bush’s administration in the same time frame, according to an Office of Management and Budget statistical database reviewed by Bloomberg.

Has there ever been a campaign season like this one -- a political party, for that matter -- where literally all of the central tenets and claims are demonstrably false? And where those falsehoods seem to matter so little to the faithful?