I know it’s too easy to link to Paul Krugman’s columns, but sometimes I can’t help myself.
We’ve all seen the GOP grumbling about polls measuring public support for Bush’s handling of the economy continue to lag. With a couple of months of relatively strong job growth, the argument goes, the poll numbers should be stronger.
And yet, they’re not. This week’s CBS poll says a stunningly low 36% of respondents say they approve of Bush on the economy, despite 900,000 new jobs created in the last four months.
Krugman helps put it all in perspective today, as only he can.
First, the job recent numbers aren’t as great as the White House would have us believe.
Let’s start with the “nearly 900,000 new jobs” created in the last four months. Is that exceptional? Well, during the first four months of 2000, the last presidential election year, the economy created 1.1 million new jobs. An e-mail message to Bush’s supporters from Ken Mehlman, his campaign manager, takes a longer view, boasting of 1.1 million jobs created since last August (when job growth finally turned positive). But in April 2000, payroll employment was 2.3 million higher than in August 1999.
And that was after seven years of sustained employment growth; rapid job growth is hard to achieve when the economy is already close to full employment. To find a year comparable to 2004, we need to look back to 1994, when the economy was still recovering from the first Bush recession. In the first four months of that year, the economy added almost 1.3 million jobs.
Second, based on the Bush White House’s own promises and expectations, the country is far short of where it should be.
[A] mere return to Clinton-era job growth isn’t enough: after all those years of poor job performance, we need extra-rapid growth to make up for lost time.
Here’s one way to look at it. The job forecast in the 2002 Economic Report of the President assumed that by 2004 the economy would have fully recovered from the 2001 recession. That recovery, according to the official projection, would lead to average payroll employment of 138 million this year — 7 million more than the actual number. So we have a gap of 7 million jobs to make up.
And employment is chasing a moving target: it must rise by about 140,000 a month just to keep up with a growing population. In April, the economy added 288,000 jobs. If you do the math, you discover that President Bush needs about four years of job growth at last month’s rate to reach what his own economists consider full employment.
The bottom line, then, is that Mr. Bush’s supporters have no right to complain about the public’s failure to appreciate his economic leadership. Three years of lousy performance, followed by two months of good but not great job growth, is not a record to be proud of.