BushBoyzzz' Economy Problems

From no less than the Washington Times, which is not considered a "pro-labor" paper, the following:

...Early each month, when the employment figures are released, the White House triumphantly issues a press release celebrating the number of jobs that were created during the preceding month and since August 2003. But the Bush-Cheney administration entered office more than two and a half years before August 2003.

The job-creation numbers since August 2003 do appear to be impressive. Nonfarm employment, for example, increased by 7.329 million jobs from September 2003 through December 2006. Compared to previous administrations, however, the overall Bush administration jobs numbers are significantly inferior...

...The 4.663 million jobs created during the 2001-2006 period amount to fewer than 65,000 per month. More than 1.3 million (18,100 per month) of these jobs were added in the government sector. Thus, fewer than 47,000 nonfarm payroll jobs have been added each month (on average) in the private sector during the last six years (0.5 percent per year). The Reagan administration added more than 150,000 private jobs per month during its eight years. Private payrolls increased by nearly 225,000 jobs per month during the Clinton administration.

...Confining ourselves to the 40-month cherry-picked period (September 2003 to December 2006), we find that private-sector employment has been rising by 170,000 jobs per month (1.8 percent per year). Throughout the eight years of the Reagan and Clinton presidencies, private nonfarm payrolls grew by 2.3 percent and 2.7 percent per year, respectively. In other words, private employment grew more than five times as fast during the Clinton administration as it did during the first six years of the Bush administration.

Productivity (output per hour) in the nonfarm business sector was 18.6 percent higher during the fourth quarter of 2006 than it was six years earlier. However, the real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) average hourly wage for private-sector production and nonsupervisory workers (80 percent of the workforce) was only 3.5 percent higher over the same six-year period. During the previous six years (1995-2000), this wage increased more than twice as fast.

...In a new series of income data, the Labor Department recently reported that the real median weekly earnings of wage and salary workers employed full-time during last year's fourth quarter had increased only 0.6 percent since the fourth quarter of 2000. For men working full-time, median weekly earnings actually declined by 0.8 percent over the same six-year period.

The Census Bureau publishes annual income data for households and full-time workers. The latest data are for 2005, whose annualized productivity level was 16.5 percent higher than 2000's and 23.3 percent higher than that in 1998. Nevertheless, the median household income in 2005 was 2.7 percent below the 2000 median level and still less than the median level in 1998. Real median earnings in 2005 for full-time, year-round male workers were less than their 1998 level.

In its fact sheet issued after the January employment numbers were released, the White House reported that "real after-tax income per person has risen by 9.8 percent" since 2000. ...the average annual rate of increase (1.6 percent) is less than the average annual rate during the Carter administration (1.9 percent), the Reagan administration (2.5 percent) and the Clinton administration (1.8 percent)....

I'm sure the BushBots have a response. Look for the paper-hanging and happy-talk during the next week, as it's 'splained away in terms of "health-care costs."

But before you swallow THAT line whole, compare "health-care cost" acceleration during the Clinton Administration.

One possible hypothesis: the cost of regulation and taxes in the USA are so burdensome that it is no longer worthwhile to create private-sector jobs here, aside from at Starbucks. Of course, the next question is "compared to where?" and the answer is Red China and India.

Since the Bush Administration has not seen fit to counteract the PRChinese full-scale assault on US labor, (you know--realistic pricing for the Yuan, a counter for PRC's super-aggressive export finance policies, not to mention slave-labor) it could be concluded that GWB doesn't understand what a trade-war really is.

Hint to George: we're losing it.