Employment: Keeping Score

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 2.5 million more jobs last month than there were in January 2001, when Bush took office.

That's not very good. First of all, the economists say that the economy has to create between 130,000 and 150,000 new jobs a month, just to keep up with population growth. If we take the lower end of that range and multiply, the U.S. economy needed to create over 8 million new jobs in the past 62 months.

Obviously 2.5 million is way short of that.

But it gets even worse. Only 1.4 million of those jobs have been generated by the private sector. The other 1.1 million are new state and local government jobs, mostly local. (Federal employment has declined slightly since January 2001.) So nearly half the already paltry number of jobs created since Bush took office have been your tax dollars at work.

Sixty-two months into Bush's Administration, with tax cuts and corporate subsidies galore that were supposed to generate new employment, and all this activity has only created 1.4 million private-sector jobs. Pretty sad.

Obviously the Bush economic theory isn't working. (Well, maybe it's working just fine, but I'll leave that for another post.)

By comparison, 62 months into Clinton's presidency, the private sector had created 14 million new jobs. No decimal point. Fourteen million, not one point four million. Ten times as many. And that's after an upper-bracket tax hike that was supposed to choke off investment and cause the economy to do a belly-flop.

As The Onion satirically 'quoted' Bush as saying back in January 2001, "Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over." Who knew they were prophesying?


NOTE: to obtain the referenced stats for yourself, click the post title, which will take you to a BLS page with a bunch of check boxes. In the right-hand column, click the top two boxes, and the one about tenth from the bottom, in the row that says "Government." Then click the "Retrieve data" button at the bottom. That'll give you the number of people employed in every month for the past ten years, in three compact tables: one for overall, one for private sector, and one for government.

Once you get those tables, at the top of that page you can change the years so that it covers the Clinton years too. Do that, and click 'Go.' Getting BLS labor statistics is easy once you know how.