The Economic Policy Institute's JobWatch digs into the recent unemployment numbers trumpeted by the popular press and the spin machine otherwise known as the White House as being good news:

Payroll jobs are now 332,000, or 0.3%, greater than at the start of the recession 47 months ago (March 2001). However, private-sector jobs are still down by 477,000, a contraction of 0.4%. The 809,000 jobs created in the government sector in this time explain the difference between growth in total payroll and private-sector jobs. Overall, this level of creation represents the worst job performance since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting monthly jobs data in 1939 (at the end of the Great Depression).

So, just how bad is the Bush "recovery?" EPI estimates that if historical precedents had held the tax-cut fueled "recovery" would have created some 7,282,000 "private-sector jobs." Now, I've never been very good at math, but it seems to me that the Radical Republican rhetoric about perusing a pro-growth and pro-job agenda rings just a bit hollow.
posted by Idle Crank at 3/05/2005 04:23:00 PM