New unemployment numbers are bad news for everyone — including Bush

Unemployment increased to a nine-year high in June, with the unemployment rate reaching 6.4%, far worse than expected. In total, 30,000 private sector jobs were lost last month, on top of 70,000 job cuts in May.

Two million people were unemployed for 27 weeks or more last month, an increase of 410,000 since the start of the year.

Obviously, this is awful news for those Americans who, ahem, are having trouble in the job market.

But looking at this from a purely political angle, persistent unemployment will certainly burden Bush’s re-election hopes. After all, 2.4 million fewer Americans are working now than the day Bush was inaugurated — not exactly a record to be proud of, especially considering Clinton created 22 million new jobs in his eight years in the White House.

Indeed, as the New York Times noted today, the last president to experience negative job growth was Herbert Hoover (R), who left the White House disgraced in 1932 and whose policies are believed to have contributed the Great Depression.

Bush and Hoover — that’s a winning comparison for the Democratic Party. After all, the only incumbent Republican presidents to lose re-election since 1900 were named Hoover and Bush. Hmm.

It’s a telling statistic. America has had weak economic growth multiple times over the last 70+ years, including a recession in the early 1980s, a worse one in the late 1980s, an oil crisis in the early 1970s, and “stagflation” in the late 1970s. Yet every president since FDR has enjoyed positive job growth — until George W.

The Bush administration believes it knows exactly what America needs to get people working again — tax cuts for the wealthy. So that’s what they’ve done, over and over again. When Bush cut taxes dramatically in 2001, he said the job growth would be tremendous. More recently, after signing yet another huge tax cut, Bush said his policies would create 1.4 million new jobs by the end of 2004.

Well, he’s not exactly off to a good start, now is he?

Few outside the White House believe the latest round of tax cuts could create this number of jobs in 18 months. But even if 1.4 million jobs are created by then, the fact will remain that Bush will be the first president in over 70 years to oversee a net loss in employment numbers.

Not only is this incredible, it’s hard to defend on the campaign trail.

Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House Minority Leader, has begun summarizing Bush’s economic record as “$3 trillion deeper in debt, 3 million fewer jobs.” (Private sector jobs have fallen by more than 3 million, but the overall decline is 2.4 million because of new government hiring.)

By the way, would this be a good time to mention, as the Times did, that the six presidents with the best records of job creation since 1933 are all Democrats? Just wondering.