“Our economy is strong, but we need to work together to make sure that we continue to have a prosperous economy,” said Bush.
However, as David Lazarus writes in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, Bush’s view of the economy is one which is, at best, one-sided.
Bush’s skewed outlook
“More Americans are working today than ever before,” the president observed. “Homeownership is at an all-time high. Small businesses are flourishing. Families are taking home more of what they earn.”
George Bush is not the only person who has the opinion that the economy is ‘firing on all cylinders’. If the talking points sound familiar, they should. Everyone from supply-side talking heads like Larry Kudlow, to administration officials like John Snow have been using the same figures, often the same sentences, to support their so-called ‘strong’ economy theory.
So, on the one hand we have Bush – “I say it’s strong.” On the other hand we have Lazarus – “OK, where to begin?”
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.
To cite job creation over just the past couple of years, he added, “is nothing more than cherry picking. It’s like a rooster taking credit because the sun came up.”
Bush boasted Tuesday that the unemployment rate is 5.2 percent. It was at a 30-year low of 3.9 percent when he took office.
He also said more Americans are working now than ever before. Yet the same could be said in most months of most years. The plain fact is that the U. S. economy has grown fairly steadily since the end of the Great Depression.
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. It wasn’t until January of this year that he could say this again.
Meanwhile, an interesting number was released by the White House on Friday, as most people were heading off for the long holiday weekend.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that U.S. employers engaged in 1, 274 mass layoff actions last month. A mass layoff is defined as any firing that involves 50 or more workers.
As of today, it would seem that David Lazarus has some company. This morning, Challenger, Gray and Christmas made this announcement about Bush’s so-called ‘strong’ economy.
Computer companies announced 17,886 job cuts in May, eight times higher than April’s level and accounting for more than one-fifth of all job cuts in May, Challenger said.
“The surge in computer industry job cuts does suggest that there are some problems in the economy. A major factor behind May computer (job) cuts was weakness in the European economy,” Challenger said in a statement.
The May jump in announced job cuts is the latest evidence that U.S. employment growth may be slowing.
John Challenger stated this morning on CNBC that a rise in IT offshoring could account for the eight fold increase in IT job cuts.
