PEP, December 2003: The World of Work, Bush's jobless recovery

President George W. Bush is gearing up to run for re-election with the worst jobs record of any president since Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression.

With 2.8 million jobs wiped out on his watch, Bush is the only president in the last 70 years to oversee a net loss of jobs.

The White House was ebullient over last month’s report that the economy grew at a 7.2 percent rate from July to September and an earlier report that said 126,000 jobs were created in September. But most economists agree that growth isn’t sustainable. And with new young employees entering the work force, the economy would have to create 200,000 jobs a month before the pool of 9 million unemployed workers shrinks.

The Bush administration has used the third quarter’s high growth to cover up an otherwise ugly economic picture for working families. In reality, ordinary workers still struggle with either anemic income growth or the declining and stagnating wages that characterized the last quarter century. Except for the tax cuts that mainly benefit the super rich, the Bush administration has essentially had a do-nothing economic policy.

We are experiencing not just job destruction but also the elimination of good jobs.

Falling standard of living
Living standards for many have actually declined since Bush lost the popular vote three years ago and the conservative U.S. Supreme Court handed him the presidency by canceling the recount of the flawed election in Florida. Consider the following:

Unemployment was 6 percent in October, compared with 4.1 percent when Bush took office in January 2001.
The economy has shed nearly 3 million jobs — mainly in the manufacturing sector — since Bush became president.
For every three people laid off, only one matches their old salary in three years, says the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many well-paying jobs with good benefits and union protections are likely gone forever.
Some 4.5 million people work part-time because they can’t find full-time positions, according to BLS.
A report by the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas says in many instances the part-time worker “earns far less than his or her experience warrants,” such as a computer consultant working at a coffee shop.
Unemployment stole health insurance from 2.4 million people last year. Last year, 43.6 million lacked health insurance, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Employers have increasingly shifted health-care costs to workers.
In 2003, 13 percent of employers cut health benefits. Since 1998, the out-of-pocket health expenses of the average worker have more than doubled to $2,126 this year, according to a survey of 300 large employers by Hewitt Associates, a benefits consulting firm.
Median household income has declined over the past two years.
The poverty rate increased from 11.3 percent of the workforce in 2000 to 12.1 percent — 34.6 million — in 2002.

Broken promises
The current job crisis is the first recession since 1939 that all the lost jobs have not been recovered within 2½ years, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.

Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow confidently predicts that as the economy recovers, 200,000 new jobs will be created each month, a big cutback from the administration’s previous predictions.

EPI estimates that even if the economy produced the inflated numbers of jobs that the Bush administration has promised, it would take over four years to make up for the jobs he has already wiped out.

So, notwithstanding the recent uptick in the economy, Bush will be running for re-election in 2004 on a record as the Great Job Terminator.