I wasn’t planning on returning to this topic, but the White House’s spinning of last month’s abysmal job numbers was so annoying, I can’t let it go.
In reality, Bush doesn’t have a lot of options here. His vaunted tax cuts should be, according to White House estimates, producing robust job growth right now. Instead, we’re seeing next to nothing. Bush’s policies, by any reasonable definition, have been an abject failure.
But he certainly can’t admit that, so, as Bob Herbert said today, the president “continues to sing from the tattered pages of his economic hymnbook.”
Indeed, here’s one of Bush’s favorite lines from his new stump speech:
“When it comes to improving our economy and creating new jobs, results matter.”
The problem, of course, is two-fold. One, the “results” are awful and Bush’s policies aren’t working. Two, the White House hasn’t figured out how to explain why they’ve failed.
On Friday, in New Hampshire, for example, Bush said, “We’ve been through a recession, we’ve been through corporate scandals, we’ve been through a terrorist attack.”
All of these things are true, but Bush is still confused — he doesn’t get to use these excuses anymore.
I don’t mean to beat an unemployed horse here, but either Bush has no idea how bad the job market really is or he has embarrassingly low standards for what constitutes success.
Indeed, the excuse-trio of recession/corporate scandal/Sept. 11 was the explanation for Bush’s failures before last summer. When Bush was selling his so-called “jobs and growth” plan in 2003, he said we needed more tax cuts because these three catastrophes threw the job market off course.
Congress did as he asked and pushed yet another tax cut plan through. His plan was the remedy, Bush said, for the excuse-trio. His economic agenda would correct the problem and set the economy on track for millions of new jobs.
And yet, it’s impossible to overlook how far we are from where Bush promised we’d be.
The Bush Administration called the tax cut package, which was passed in May 2003 and took effect in July 2003, its “Jobs and Growth Plan.” The president’s economics staff, the Council of Economic Advisers projected that the plan would result in the creation of 5.5 million jobs by the end of 2004 — 306,000 new jobs each month starting in July 2003. The CEA projected that the economy would generate 228,000 jobs a month without a tax cut and 306,000 jobs a month with the tax cut. Thus, it projected that 3,978,000 jobs would be created over the last 13 months. In reality, since the tax cuts took effect, there are 2,565,000 fewer jobs than the administration projected would be created by enactment of its tax cuts.
Bush boasts constantly of the 1.4 million new jobs created over the last year, but he fails to mention how awful these numbers are on their own and how far this total is from where we’re supposed to be.
The timing is also embarrassing. When the tax cuts failed to produce jobs in late 2003, Bush’s guarantees not withstanding, the White House insisted the cuts hadn’t had time to start working. By that logic, July 2004 should be the ideal time to see just how effective Bush’s “jobs and growth” agenda really is.
As The Gadflyer’s Tom Schaller noted, this has been a horrible summer for Americans looking for work, at a time when it’s supposed to be a robust market.
[T]he Bureau of Labor Statistics adjusted the June 2004 number downward from 112,000 to just 78,000, a net loss of 34,000 jobs, which is even less than the 32,000 created in July. So, although 300,000 new jobs would have needed to be created during the past two months just to break even, instead there were only 120,000 new jobs. That’s 180,000 jobs below the break-even point.
So, what kind of new excuse does the White House have to explain the shortfall? As far as I can tell, they haven’t thought of one yet. Professor DeLong raises the question perfectly:
It is worth noting that the administration’s forecast, made last winter, was that by this time payroll employment would be at 132.8 million — not the 131.3 million that it is actually at. Somebody should ask Bush today what has gone so unexpectedly wrong to put employment 1.5 million lower than expectations in just half a year.
And that may be the most irritating political angle to this mess. Bush, like his father before him, is simply incapable of admitting he has a problem. As a result, he perceives bad news as “proof” of his triumph.
The president is either out of touch with reality or he has to pretend to be out of touch so he can boast of job numbers that are nothing to brag about.