Bush bragging on historically weak job growth

[Roland99]

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/ib237

President Bush was busy crowing today about the job growth that has occurred on his watch, citing the creation of more that 8 million jobs since August 2003 and “the longest continuous months of job growth on record.”

...

(see Figure A)

The current cycle is an obvious laggard, with job growth up far less than the others. Payrolls were only 4.3% higher in September 2007 than in March 2001, due both to the long jobless recovery that lasted through August 2003, and the subsequent low growth rate of jobs compared to past cycles.

By month 78, the other three cycles posted growth rates of at least 10% (compared to the current 4.3%).

Note also that the White House and other partisans often ignore the economists’ convention of measuring job growth over the business cycle (to control for macroeconomic conditions) and have instead started counting from the end of the jobless recovery, in August 2003, or month 29 of the cycle.

But, I'm sure the Fed will recognize the true dangers fundamentally inherent in the state of our economy right now and do the right thing and not continue to protect the markets, the banks, and the mega-corps in today's predicted rate cut move.


:sarcasm:

[fasttense]

1. There was no recovery.

The only thing that happened was that the US uber rich moved their money into government contractors after the dotcom bubble burst and the middle class stopped saving and picked up more debt.

"The long jobless recovery." If there are no decent paying jobs, how can it be a recovery?

[Lasher]

2. This is the biggest pack of liars who have ever lived.

They always cite job growth, going back to the deep chasm of 2003. How handy for them to exclude the net job loss during the first three years of this train wreck.

Bush's skewed outlook
Wednesday, June 1, 2005

"I say it's strong," he said of the economy, "because we've added over 3. 5 million new jobs over the last two years, and the unemployment rate is 5.2 percent.

<snip>

More than 3.5 million jobs may have been created during the past two years as the nation's economic recovery limped forward. But this president hasn't been in office for just two years. He's been in the White House more than four.

Since January 2001, when Bush took office, the U.S. economy has added a total of only about 800,000 jobs, according to the Labor Department.

To put that in context, about 2.1 million jobs were added to the economy annually over the previous two decades, including intervals of recession.

During Bush's tenure, just a tenth of that number of jobs have been created each year.

"This president is crowing about a very poor job-creation performance by any historical measure," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the left- leaning Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/06/01/BUGDLD17TI1.DTL&type=business

Junior also likes to claim the stock market is booming and he goes back to the deep pit of January 2003 as a starting point for the result he cites. But if you crunch the numbers from January 2001 to December 2007 you will find that the S&P 500 gained an average of only 3.93% annually, not adjusted for inflation. I used the closing price on the last trading day of each year. To calculate the gain for 2007 I doubled the midyear performance.

How good is that? Going all the way back to the beginning of Carter's presidency in 1977, the average S&P 500 gain has been 11.86% per year. For Clinton's 8 years the average was 15.86%. And for Carter, who is to this day defamed by Saint Ronnie's worshipers: 7.07%.

[ProSense]

3. In 2004, he bragged that he would create 300,000 jobs per month

In 2004, Bush bragged about the impact his tax cuts (which he raided Social Security to pay for) would have on the economy:

Still, when arguing for the tax cuts, the Bush administration promised they would create about 300,000 jobs every month, beginning in July 2003 -- most economists doubt last year's numbers will be revised that dramatically.

In early October, Bush was bragging about 182,000 jobs created over a two-month period:

The department said 89,000 jobs were created in August, rather than the 4,000 that it reported last month were lost. It also said 93,000 jobs were created in July instead of 68,000 it previously reported -- a total of 118,000 more jobs in the July-August period than it had earlier estimated.

[Roland99]

4. That's insanity! That's *double* the number needed each month to maintain equilibrium w/pop. growth

We've been averaging *well* under that this year.

[Lasher]

7. By the numbers

According to the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, payrolls have hit record levels in 51 of the 66 years since 1939, or 77 percent of the time. Of the 15 years when a president couldn't claim that more Americans are working than ever before, three have been on Bush's watch - 2002, 2003 and 2004.

In the previous 2 decades about 2.1 million jobs were added to the economy annually.

[NewJeffCT]

5. Even 8 million jobs in 4+ years is nothing special

For several reasons:

1) the biggest gain in employment under Bush has been with the US government - at least partly due to the creation of the Homeland Security Dept.

2) Bill Clinton's four year average was about 11 million for four years.
Jimmy Carter created over 10 million jobs in his four years, and the US population was about a good 60 million less when Carter came into office as compared to Bush, so he had a smaller labor force with which to create jobs.

3) Carter inherited an energy crisis and an inflation crisis from Nixon. Clinton inherited gargantuan deficits from Reagan. Bush came into office after an amazing run of unprecedented growth, low interest rates and with spending under control.

[rurallib]

6. Two points: 1) who can believe their numbers to begin with?

Why would they tell the truth about this when they tell the truth about nothing else?
2) I have heard that just to keep pace with new workers, the economy needs to produce 150,000 jobs a month. So after @80 months, Bushco needed to have produced 12 million jobs. Even their bullshit numbers say they are short.
Bonus 3rd point: What kind of jobs are they? Walmart, McDonald's etc?

[Roland99]

8. Well, there *was* an "adjustment" earlier this year that "created" over 3/4 million extra jobs!

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1836639&mesg_id=1836955