"Who founded EPI?
EPI was founded by a group of economic policy experts that includes Jeff Faux, EPI's first president; economist Barry Bluestone of Northeastern University; Robert Kuttner, columnist for Business Week and Newsweek and editor of The American Prospect; Ray Marshall, former U.S. secretary of labor and professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas-Austin; Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor and professor at Brandeis University; and economist Lester Thurow of the MIT Sloan School of Management."
I'll remember this if we ever experience "sluggish private job growth" in America again.
It does not "indicate" any such thing.
With the economic hits of high oil prices and climbing interest rates, there may very well have been job LOSES and recession if the tax cuts had not kept money in buyer's pockets.
They write this article like nothing special happened twixt 2001 to now.
What a bunch of bull. We'd be in a recession if it weren't for the tax cuts. This economy has survived a steep increase in oil prices, not to mention natural disasters.
Supporters of these tax cuts have touted them as great contributors to growth in jobs and pay. But, in reality, private-sector job growth since 2001 has been disappointing,
Gosh, I wonder if anything happened between 1999 and 2002 to interfere with job growth that somehow isn't mentioned in the article... like the dot-com bubble burst, the corporate scandals, the worst terrorist attack in history targeting the nation's economic heart... nah, that can't have anything to do with it.
Predictable liberals... actual growth in the face of those enormous obstacles, and it simply isn't enough... and more government spending is the answer.
Utterly moronic.
It's all been downhill since the housing bubble burst five years ago.
This article is so full of wrong information that it pathetic. The writer still believes in the failed Keynesian economics.
These clowns would have us believe that companies that profit from defense spending are not part of the private sector.
Same old pack of lies.
The phone's been ringing nonstop.
If this is "sluggish", I wouldn't survive "heated".
what plamet is this guy talking about?
Unemployment is too low right now to have high sky-high job growth anyway. Unemployment doesn't go down to 0% when there is a good economy; 95% is usually considered "full employment".
The authors have engaged in a little bait and switch here. First they analyze job performance over the term of Bush's presidency (a perfectly valid topic), but then in their conclusion they switch over and try to pretend that they're analyzing the results of Bush's tax cut. If you want to see how the tax cuts have affected the economy, you have to look at the period in which the tax cuts were in effect: that's 2003-2006, NOT 2001-2006. Since the authors are using net job gains, the 2001-2002 period of massive job loss contributes to their predetermined conclusion by allowing them to deflate the actual gains made after the cuts.
But I'm sure that's all a coincidence...
This isn't implausible.
The liberals are just missing the story of the ever growing number of baby boomers who are retiring and dropping out of the workforce. That is why job growth can be low, and there can also be no unemployment crisis.
Low job growth combined with more production equals higher productivity equals higher wage growth equals higher profit growth.
What is so bad about that?
Lee Price came to EPI after 18 years in government and eight years at the International Union, UAW. During six years at the Commerce Department, he served as Chief Economist and Deputy Under Secretary for Economic Affairs (during Clinton Administration). He also spent 12 years on the staff of four Congressional committees: Joint Economic, Senate Budget, Senate Democratic Policy, and House Banking.
Lee Price, research director with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.
The American Prospect was founded in 1990 as an authoritative magazine of liberal ideas, committed to a just society, an enriched democracy, and effective liberal politics. Robert Kuttner, Robert Reich, and Paul Starr launched the magazine initially as a quarterly.
The economy has shrugged off the worst attack in history on American soil, the war on terror, hurricanes galore, the almost total loss of a major American city. Despite all this, home ownership is at an all-time high and unemployment is at one of the lowest levels ever! Yeah, the tax cuts had nothing to do with it!
Gee Bush said tonight that America had creatd 4.6 MILLION new jobs since 2001.
Who to believe ...