An article at Powerline complains that…well, here’s the quote:
A year and a half ago, American was said to be in the throes of a “jobless recovery.” President Bush predicted that, with his tax cuts in place, the economy would continue to grow and we would see that growth reflected in substantial net job creation.This turned out to be the case.
A little digging around shows that in that time period employment has risen by about 161,000 per month. If we assume that ‘net job creation’ means more created than destroyed, then that seems pretty substantial. If we factor in the approximately 150,000 jobs per month needed to keep pace with rising populations, however, then the real net comes down to 11,000 per month. With around 7.7 million people unemployed, an extra 11,000 is better than nothing I guess, but it’s going to take us a little over 58 years to cut the number of unemployed in half. Now I know that technically that means this isn’t a jobless recovery, but it’s certainly pretty close…
2 Comments
The Bureau of Labor Statistics site lets you look at ALL the numbers yourself. You can even download them and do your own analysis. When I did this a couple of times a while ago, the outlook was pretty dark in my mind: there seems to be a long term trend of a “third-worldization” of our economy. The future of America is, frankly, to become a country like China. With some people doing very well, sure. But mostly comprising of docile, uneducated and desperate citizens willing to take it up the *** by an increasingly captive and draconian government and their masters: the foreign financial community. Which is only logical from a leftist, statist government like the Bush / NeoCon one we have now (yup, you read that right: I did say leftist). If there is one dirty secret is that our national blueprint winks at latter-day Chinese Communism where George is the ultimate Manchurian Candidate.
Alos today’s New York Times carries an article “Falling Fortunes of Wage Earners” noting that “Even though the economy added 2.2 million jobs in 2004 and produced strong growth in corporate profits, wages for the average worker fell for the year, after adjusting for inflation – the first such drop in nearly a decade.”