Friday afternoon, the latest data on U.S. unemployment became available. It wasn’t good news.
The nation lost an additional 93,000 jobs in August, the seventh consecutive month U.S. employers cut jobs from the workforce and more than double the number of jobs lost in July.
Refresh my memory, didn’t Bush push through a $350 billion tax cut for the wealthy as the central feature of his job creation plan?
You may have heard over the weekend that overall unemployment rate in America is about 6.1 percent, which is down about a tenth of a percent from July. Good news? Not really. The number doesn’t include those people who have been unemployed and have effectively given up trying to find a job where there are none available.
Bush, meanwhile, remains utterly clueless. Last week, upon hearing of the latest unemployment numbers, the president said, “Tax relief is stimulating job creation all across the country.”
Actually, George, it’s not. Since the 2003 tax cut was passed, 225,000 jobs have been eliminated in the U.S.
As the Washington Post explained over the weekend, once the latest tax cut for the wealthy became law, White House economists had predicted it would add 1.4 million new jobs through 2004, on top of 4.1 million jobs that a growing economy would have generated anyway, a rate of 344,000 jobs created a month. By its own accounting, the Bush administration fell 437,000 jobs short of its own projections in August.
What’s truly remarkable to me is why Bush would believe he has even a shred of credibility left on this issue. Every proposal Bush has offered, every promise Bush has made, every tax cut Bush has signed came with a simple guarantee: job growth.
Yet here we find Bush with the worst record on job creation of any president in over seven decades. An average of 69,000 jobs have been lost per month since Bush was sworn in. With over 3 million Americans having lost their job since Bush’s inauguration, this president is still very much on track to be the first since Herbert Hoover to experience negative job growth.
(Would this be an inconvenient time to bring up the fact that Bill Clinton created over 10 million new jobs in his first term, 22 million new jobs over his eight years in the White House, and had the strongest record on U.S. employment since FDR? But I digress…)
Let’s put the current employment numbers in some historical perspective. The 22 consecutive months of job losses since the 2001 recession ended is the longest such streak since WWII. According to an LA Times article, at a comparable point after Bush’s father’s recession, nearly a million jobs were added to the workforce.
For more on Bush’s record on employment, be sure to check out a new website called Job Watch, created by the fine folks at the Economic Policy Institute.