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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Don't believe the Bush administration's hand-wringing over its pathetic record on employment. The president's backers want a stagnant job market -- it keeps the help from getting uppity.
Jan 19, 2004 | On Tuesday night, President Bush will use his State of the Union to claim that tax cuts have restored economic growth, and he may mention the stock market's rise last year. But the transcendent economic issue this election year isn't the growth rate. It isn't the stock market. It also isn't the budget deficit the tax cuts caused. And it isn't even the rate of unemployment. It's the number of people in this country who have decent work -- and the number who don't.
Here's a chart, taken almost directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It shows the month-to-month change in total employment, and how it fell from an average gain of 236,000 during the Clinton presidency to an average loss of 66,000 per month under George Bush. (The chart shows payroll jobs, averaged over three months.) The arrow, which I added, shows when Bush took office.
Economic numbers don't get more clear than this: 
Next, notice when the deep dive ends. That's right: It was just after Sept. 11, 2001. It's true that President Bush ought not to be blamed for the job losses of the Internet bust. But neither can he properly blame his troubles on Osama bin Laden: Job losses slowed down when the war on terror began.
Bush should be judged on the record after that -- on the creation of jobs in 2002 and 2003. After all, the recession officially ended in November 2001. How many new jobs did we get since then? An average loss of 22,000 jobs every month.
There are no new jobs. Total job growth in the Clinton years: 23 million. Total job losses so far in the Bush years: over 2 million. Total gains in the last six months, since the so-called recovery supposedly accelerated in the third quarter? Just 221,000. That's less than a single month's average under Clinton. And last month? One thousand new jobs.
How many jobs should there have been? Crudely, the Clinton pace over three years would have yielded about 8.5 million. Allowing Bush a pass for 2001, matching Clinton in just two years would have meant 5.6 million new jobs, not the loss of another half a million. Want more? Lee Price of the Economic Policy Institute has a very useful study here.
Bush's minions whitewash these figures by pointing to the household employment survey, which shows more (though not great) job growth. Here's the main difference: The household survey covers 60,000 households. The payroll survey covers 400,000 businesses (and millions of workers). The payroll survey measures real jobs. Most agree that the payroll survey, while not perfect (it misses some new jobs in the upswing), is the better of the two reports.
The household survey does pick up many people who call themselves self-employed, independent contractors and the like. (When academics do this, we call it "consulting.") Some would have you believe that this is the future of the economy, but let's hope not. Most such work is stopgap, a way to scrape by when regular work is hard to find. Most people doing it would abandon it for a real job, if they could, in a minute. Real jobs -- with benefits and a semblance of security -- are better.
True, the unemployment rate doesn't look so bad. But why not? Partly because many people who can't get unemployment insurance now get themselves on the disabled rolls if they can. (Disability, the refuge of the desperate, has been growing very fast.) And the jobless rate did fall in December. But why? Because many thousands of people stopped looking for work. Some retired; a few went back to school; most just went home to wait it out. Very sensible of them, under these conditions.
The Bush years are a study in deliberately wasted effort: Repeal of the estate tax. Tax exemption for stock dividends. Ballistic Missile Defense. The USA PATRIOT Act. The war on Iraq. Each of these initiatives has a clientele. None of them seriously aims to achieve its stated goal, be that economic recovery or homeland security or national security writ large.
The method is clear to any who choose to study closely: It is a method of subterfuge and deception. It is the systematic and relentless pursuit of partly hidden agendas, sold to the public with slogans. The tax cuts were not aimed to produce recovery and jobs; they were a reward to the rich. The war on Iraq was not waged to help the war on terror; it was about getting Saddam, as we have now had confirmed by Paul O'Neill's report on the Iraq agenda Bush carried from the beginning. Missile defense is not about North Korea, and still less about Iran or any other "rogue state"; it's about the contracts. In all these cases, the decision on what to do came first -- then the circumstances of the day were arranged to suit.
So it is today on the economy. What does Bush want? He wants a growth rate high enough to get him through the election. That's obvious. After that, he doesn't care. His clientele -- the military contractors, oil companies, pharmaceutical firms and big media that control this government -- make their money on patents, contracts and the exercise of monopoly power. (Case in point: Bush is pressuring impoverished Central Americans, in trade negotiations, to add 10 years to the length of drug patents.) These people have no interest in full employment. They like unemployment, weak labor, low wages and a government that bullies on their behalf. And after the election, if Bush wins, that is what they will get for four more years.
