Check to have links open new windows.

That's the title of a post at Blogs for Bush, a bad neighborhood I stumbled into recently. The post is, not surprisingly, bashing Democrats. But let's look just a bit deeper. This is from the post:

One would think that Howard Dean and the rest of the left wing would be happy about the most recent economic numbers (they are not). Not only do interest rates remain near historical lows, but the Dow is up roughly 34 percent and the tech heavy NASDAQ is up around 45 percent. Professional economists, who work for a living rather than teach classes at Berkeley, will tell you the cause of those great numbers was the President Bush’s tax cuts. JFK's tax cut and Reagan's tax cuts had the same result - a full-blown economic recovery. In baseball, when a player goes 4-for-4 and hits the game winning home run, that player is the hero. Folks look up to that player and want him on their team.

Now you might think that someone going on about the truth would also consider the unemployment numbers or the fact that Dean isn't really "left wing", but we'll give that a pass for a moment.

That link under "Professional economists" goes to a story at money.cnn.com. How well does it support the claims being made? I report, you decide (as they say). All excerpts below taken from the article:

At the urging of President Bush, Congress has passed tax cuts in each of the past three years that, combined with a recession, a bear market in stocks, terrorist attacks and wars, helped to turn a $127 billion budget surplus in 2001 into a projected budget deficit of more than $400 billion in the fiscal 2003, which ends Sept. 30. [Gee, that doesn't look like "a full-blown economic recovery to me. -ed.]

"By 2005, I expect the economy will be stronger, more fully utilized" but still not up to full strength, said Citigroup senior economist Steven Wieting.... [OK, there's a "professional economist", and gee, it doesn't sound like he's talking about a "full-blown economic recovery" to me, either. -ed.]

"Like it or not, rich people are the ones who save and invest. If you give people who accumulate capital a tax cut and take it back, you send the message that they can't trust the government," said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the Economic Forecasting Center at Georgia State University in Atlanta. "That's not good for capital accumulation, which is needed for investment in the long run." [Well, here's someone who favors keeping the cuts, but I still don't see an endorsement of any "full-blown economic recovery. But hey, wait a minute! This guy is teaching classes, if a bit east of Berkeley, so we apparently shouldn't be listening to him. -ed]

"I don't buy into those supply-side, trickle-down ideas," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. "Those arguments might have made some sense 25 years ago, when the top tax rate was 70 percent, but not today, when the top rate is half of that." [OK, now I'm confused. Here's a bona fide professional economist, and he's arguing against the tax cuts. -ed]

You know what I think? I think it's just more faith-based economics.

At this point, if a Republican told me the sun would come up in the east tomorrow morning, I wouldn't believe him until I had enough light to read my compass.