Bush Job Growth Poor

by Mary

CNN has one of those strange articles which says that the economy hasn't been as good at producing jobs under Bush as under either Clinton or Reagan, but nevertheless the economy under Bush is very good despite the job record.

Why do they think that is? The economy doesn't need to make as many jobs as before because the number of people entering the job market is a lot lower because the baby boomers are soon to be retiring and women aren't entering at the rate they did earlier. So that old number of how many jobs the economy needed to produce to keep up with new people entering the job market, it's so 1990s.

And they say, Bush had some economic challenges early on which made the job numbers drop:

He had the 2001 recession and that year's terror attack. And, Gutierrez noted, Bush faced lingering fallout from the bursting of the stock market bubble in 2000. He also was confronted with a wave of corporate accounting scandals that rocked Wall Street -- and with Iraq war beginning in 2003.

Oh yes, I remember when he went around chortling that he'd hit the trifecta that gave him permission to engage in deep deficit spending. That little piece of bad luck for the country was his excuse for giving the multi-millionaires huge tax cuts. The fact the promised jobs never materialized wasn't because his policies were bad. After all, the country continues to have low unemployment.

For all of 2006, the unemployment rate averaged 4.6 percent, a six-year low. It was a considerable improvement from 2003's 6 percent rate, the highest under Bush.

"That says a lot," Gutierrez said of last year's showing. "I think what we are doing here is creating something that is solid, something that is enduring and something that will continue."

Yes, they certainly have created something enduring. Where people used to joke about how Clinton was creating all these new jobs -- in fact, Joe has four of them, today the not so funny joke is there are no jobs for increasing number of people who have given up looking for work and so aren't counted in the statistics. Of course, there are lots of jobs in those meat packing plants now that the INS has hauled off the people caught in the raid. Just not so many middle class stable jobs.

Befitting an interview with a Bush administration figure, it is not hard to spot the lies.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez counters, in an interview, "It's just a matter of timing and when we started getting out of the recession that the president inherited."

Uh, that recession? It started under Bush's watch, not Clinton's. How many other VRWC lies did you spot in the CNN report?