The media and Democrats keep repeating it over and over: "2.3 million jobs lost" since President Bush took office. His could be the worst job record since before World War II, they claim. One little problem: It's not true.
Not only has there been no net loss of jobs during the Bush administration, there has been a net gain, even with the devastation of 9/11. At least 2.4 million jobs have been created since the president took office, 2 million of those in 2003. The gains more than offset the losses.
While Democrats continue to beat their election-year drums about outsourcing, manufacturing losses, unemployment and slow growth in employment, America's economy has been steadily creating jobs.
At least 366,000 jobs have been created in the last five months, over 100,000 of those in January, White House press secretary Scott McClellan has noted. And though the eight-month recession "officially" ended in November, economic indicators are surprising economists and pointing toward a take-off in the recovery.
The signs:
The 5.6 percent unemployment rate is the lowest in two years and below the average of the 1980s (7.3 percent) and '90s (5.8 percent), and still continues to drop.
The nation's economic output revealed the strongest quarterly growth in 20 years. The data for the fourth quarter of 2003 show that the civilian labor force rose by 333,000, while the number of unemployed in the labor force dropped by 575,000. Even better, the number of so-called discouraged workers declined in December.
Consumer spending grew between 4 percent and 5 percent last year, and real hourly earnings rose 1.5 percent. Real earnings have risen over the last three years.
Exports doubled to 19 percent in the fourth quarter, compared to less than 9 percent in the third.
The number of American workers is at an all-time high of 138.5 million, a level never before attained in U.S. history.
Jobless claims are 10 percent below the average of the last 25 years and still falling. Hiring indices are up, even in manufacturing. Productivity growth is extremely high.
Now the doomsayers are criticizing the validity of the unemployment rate, which at 5.6 percent does not fit their gloomy story. Faulty Counting The problem is the areas of biggest job growth are usually not even being counted at all.
Though 75 percent of jobs are created by small companies, according to the Small Business Administration, this sector's entrepreneurial activity and the jobs it creates are left out by Washington bean counters when calculating official new job numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) does its Payroll Survey by phoning businesses to crunch the number of jobs that have been gained or lost. This is where Democrats grabbed onto their lifeline, the 2.3 million figure. Look only at the Payroll Survey, and there has been a gain of only 522,000 jobs since Bush took office.
But here's the rub. The Household Survey is used to determine the unemployment rate and accounts for those who are self-employed, and small emerging businesses that might be overlooked by the Payroll Survey. But the number of U.S. firms isn't static, and the "fixed list" used by the BLS for phoning established businesses does not reflect new entrepreneurial activity.
People are called at home and asked if they have jobs, or if they are in the market for a job. In contrast to the Payroll Survey, the Household Survey shows that 2.4 million jobs have been created so far during Bush's time in office. As Economy.com writer Haseeb Ahmed recently wrote, "something is amiss in the [Payroll] survey."
Credit Where Credit Is Due
That's not all. When doomsayers, and media spoiling for a fight in an election year, laughed at Bush's prediction of 2.6 million new jobs this year, not everyone was scoffing.
Ahmed, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and others hardly batted an eye. Greenspan said it was "probably feasible" the economy would reach the Bush administration's forecast of adding 2.6 million jobs this year, provided growth continues and the productivity rate slows to more typically levels.
"I don't think it's 'Fantasyland,'" Greenspan said. "I agree with him," said John Ryding, chief market economist at Bear Stearns. "I think that we will create 2.5 million, possibly more, jobs over the balance of the year."
Ahmed is convinced that "the revision patterns of the early-1990s recovery cycle" will be repeated. A total of 1.4 million job gains were revised upward to 2.9 million in the first 21 months after the end of the last recession, just after Bush Sr. was voted out of office.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/2/25/171833.shtml
If elected, will John Kerry get credit for the jobs created under the Bush administration?
The downside is that half of those jobs created are for government employees, and the other half for illegal aliens.
The Payroll Survey is biased torwards companies that outsource. The Household survey samples random households.
Now which one is the better sample? Anybody?
OK ... here are some statistics. And NO, they don't come from some conservative think tank or some research group under the control of the Republican Party. They come from the Labor Department's. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The peak unemployment rate during the recession that began in Clinton's term was 6.4 percent. The current unemployment rate is 5.6 percent. In the last year more than 2,000,000 new jobs have been added in the United States. Between 1983 and 2003 outsourcing went from 6.5 million jobs to about 10 million jobs. Between 1983 and 2002 jobs in-sourcing -- jobs coming TO the United States -- went from 2.5 million to 6.5 million. If you subtract the jobs coming to the United States every year from the jobs going out every year you come up with a "net" figure. The net outsourced jobs reached its peak in the early 1980's; a peak of about 4 million jobs. In other words, things were worse at the end of the Carter Administration then they are right now. During this same period ... from '83 to '03 a total of 38 million jobs have been created by private businesses in the United States. No other industrialized country in the world has matched this number. S