While pushing his third tax cut in as many years, Bush swore the latest round of cuts would create a robust job market. In fact, the Bush administration got specific about its claims, saying that if Congress passed Bush’s tax plan (which it did), the results would be 344,000 jobs created, per-month, starting in mid-2003. As a result, if the White House was correct in its guarantees, we would already be in the middle of vigorous job growth.
Obviously, that ain’t happening. As a result, Snow has begun offering a different story.
“I would stake my reputation on employment growth happening before Christmas,” Snow said in an interview with the Times of London. “Everything we know about economics indicates that the sort of economic growth expected for the next year, 3.8 to 4 percent, will translate into 2 million new jobs from the third quarter of this year to the third quarter of next year. That’s an average of about 200,000 new jobs a month.”
Two things. One, Snow’s reputation isn’t that great, so his willingness to bet it on strong job growth does not necessarily inspire confidence.
Two, Snow may have been hoping that no one would notice, but 200,000 new jobs a month is quite a step back from what the administration was promising us up until recently.
Bush’s first two tax cuts, which disproportionately benefited the wealthiest Americans, were supposed to create millions of jobs. Instead, the employment market under Bush has been worse than at any point in the U.S. in 70 years.
So the White House demanded another tax cut, promising 344,000 jobs per month. That hasn’t worked either. Now John Snow is moving the goal posts, promising 200,000 new jobs per month, and pretending like this would be proof of the tax cuts’ effectiveness.
As everyone’s favorite blogging economist, Maxspeak, noted yesterday, the economy needs 170,000 new jobs a month just to keep the unemployment rate from increasing, so Snow’s bold predictions really aren’t all that impressive anyway.
In fact, Maxspeak wisely reminds us that “the economy is in the unusual situation of having fewer jobs now than at the beginning of the ‘recovery,'” which, he notes, is “historic.”