March 29, 2004

"Job creation."

That was the catch phrase created in the late 1990s by the previous administration to best exemplify its stewardship of the American economy, and was used by the elite media to focus attention away from what economists were warning was just around the corner, yet was ignored as that administration basked itself in self-congratulatory revisionism.

By early 2000, the actuality of Clinton's economic tenure began to show through the bubble gum wrapping that had been holding it together, even though it would still be a couple years later before reports of the numbers proved that we were headed for a recession.

The frayed edges of the quilt of economic prosperity sold to us in the guise of job creation would begin to unravel, and we watched helplessly as the hot air balloon of the stock market started deflating. Corporate managers, who had for years been allowed to cook the books' panicked because they realized the devastating reality that was to come.

High taxation of working families was depleting the savings they'd worked on for years as they fought escalating inflation, interest rates, and healthcare costs.

With the bursting of the tech bubble and the sudden disappearance of a multitude of dot-com companies came the first signs that people were losing their jobs. Jobs had already been gradually declining, but the expansiveness of the economy had covered them up.

By the end of 1999 during the great era of job creation' where 35.7 million jobs were created, that year saw the dissolution of 33 million. By the end of 2000, Clinton's last year, job creation' had fallen off to 380,000 less jobs created than the year before.

When President Bush took the oath of office in early 2001, the American economy was already in the midst of a recession according to the National Bureau of Economic Research - a private, non-profit economic research group. With the help of Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who had held that position throughout the Clinton administration, Bush focused on a plan of action to right the ship using lowered interest rates and taxes that gave working families more spending power and helped businesses maintain viability.

This led to a dynamic economic recovery not seen in 20 yearsm compelling Hillary Clinton to announce "this administration doesn't have an economic policy." President Bush used the economic policy he doesn't have' and recovered the economic disaster created by her husband in a tenth of the time it took Clinton to make it.

In view of the fact that attacking the president on this front has become fruitless to Democrats, they have turned to the specter and their old friend job creation, calling the economic recovery a jobless recovery, then they use sentient numbers to justify their claims and equivocate when asked to explain the fact that the unemployment rate is lower today (5.6 percent) than the average rates of the 1970s (6.4 percent), '80s (7.3 percent) or the '90s (5.8 percent).

So from where do these sentient jobless recovery numbers come?

There are two sets of statistics provided by the Department of Labor from which employment numbers are culled. One is the Establishment Survey, which reports the number of people employed at 400,000 companies. This survey is the job creation' part of the equation and is the set of numbers used by Democrats to declare the loss of 2 million jobs.

Using only this source to make headlines is fallacious because the survey only covers one third of total U.S. employment by collecting data mostly from large companies but only samples smaller ones while excluding the self-employed, plus it lags about two years behind in adding newly created businesses.

The other is the Household Survey, which polls 60,000 households about their employment status, is considered the official measurement for the national unemployment rate, and includes people who are self-employed, which in December showed an all-time record of 136.2 million workers.

Neither survey includes farm employment.

Comparing the two from the beginning of 2001 to the end of 2003, the preliminary numbers show a loss of 2.3 million jobs in the Establishment survey, but an addition of 2.48 million in the Household survey. That's an increase in job creation of 176,000 that Democrats and the elite media are conveniently not reporting.

Look at the Labor Department's recently released job creation bar graph utilizing the Establishment Survey alone and you can clearly see that the bulk of job losses happened during 2001 when President Bush was just beginning to put his economic plan into effect to stem the bleeding of the recession that existed when he took office. By the end of 2001, the negative job losses were already going down as the American economy was working to rectify those losses and by the end of 2003 shows positive growth, including the first two months of 2004.

But Democrats know that George H.W. Bush lost the election in 1992 even though; as we eventually discovered, employment began to grow eight months before election day.

Just as the local economy has received positive news that a Wal-Mart Super Center will be coming to Richmond County bringing with it increased tax revenue, job employment, and other added intangibles that will help the county, the wife of Democrat presidential candidate John Kerry, Teresa Heinz, who owns more than 1 million in Wal-Mart stock said about the company, "they destroy communities."

Is this the positive outlook Democrats have for future job creation?

Attacking the president on the economy and job creation may seem tantalizing to Democrats this election season, but the more educated modern voter has better information and greater access to that information.

Simply vilifying Republicans in the media with the same stale, regurgitated charges will no longer work in this information age!

Lee P Butler