CNN/AP: Job growth under Bush slower - by millions of jobs - than under Clinton, Reagan

[DeepModem Mom]

Job growth under Bush slower than under Clinton, Reagan
January 8, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The economy has cranked out fewer jobs under President Bush -- by millions -- than it had by the same point in the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

Democrats say it's evidence that Bush's economic policies aren't working.

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez counters, in an interview, "It's just a matter of timing and when we started getting out of the recession that the president inherited."

Economists suggest something fundamentally different also may be going on in the economy: The labor force of available workers is growing more slowly as the baby boom generation ages.

Under Bush, the economy produced 3.7 million new jobs from January 2001 through December of last year based on nonfarm payroll figures collected by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That figure is likely to be higher -- perhaps by an additional 810,000 -- when the government releases annual revisions based on more complete information next month. However, that doesn't change the basic historical picture....

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/08/bush.job.count.ap/index.html

[aquart]

1. Really. And what are the comparable figures on job LOSS?

How many American jobs have fled overseas under BushCo?

[illinoisprogressive]

2. the jobs also pay much lower than ever before

[MyshkinCommaPrince]

3. Growl....

Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez counters, in an interview, "It's just a matter of timing and when we started getting out of the recession that the president inherited."

The same basic answers to everything. "It's not our fault." "The ideas are sound - the problem is the implementation."

When did blame become the core issue in every situation? Has it always been like this, and I just didn't notice? There's no discussion of solving actual problems. Just shell-games dealing with who gets blamed.

It makes me snarly. :mad:

[rodeodance]

6. Repugs blame everyone all the time

[LynnTheDem]

22. "recession the president (bush) inherited"...ROTFLMAO!!!

They lie and lie and lie...and the incredibly ignorant rightwingnuts lap this bullshit up!

No wonder the majority of Americans still think Iraq had "WMD".

The 4 senses of a rightwingnut;

STUPID. IGNORANT. WRONG. DUMB.

[LibDemAlways]

31. What recession?

Clinton presided over the longest peacetime economic expansion in US history with the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. Recession? What a crock.

[LynnTheDem]

32. Even George W. bUsh admitted -at first- it was NOT a recession until AFTER

he was in office for several months...but then he started catapulting the "inherited a recession" lie and voila; history rewritten.

[Spazito]

25. Gosh, I guess the number of jobs created by bush is....

simply "a success that is yet to occur" just like the capture of bin Laden.

[Lasher]

39. Reagan blamed Carter for everything

Almost to the last day of his 8 years in office, Saint Ronnie of Reagan blamed Carter for everything that went wrong. Junior thinks Reagan was a great president so he's trying to be just like him.

[Quantess]

4. DUH!

or is it D'OH! :dunce:

[neoblues]

5. Take away the "jobs" created by the war...

the military, the contractors and such and it's even smaller... Then too, the new jobs are service oriented, relatively low paying etc... Don't even start to think about the underfunding of Education and the implications for the future (and speaking of implications, economic implications... the enormous debt will be decreasing the amount of money the government has (or raising taxes))... Our currency is falling and will fall much further, so that even if you have a job, you won't be doing as well. Ugh.

[Up2Late]

8. And don't forget the massive growth in Federal Government jobs...

...last time I heard, it was something like 35% of the "new jobs" under this pResident are NEW "Bigger Government" jobs (DHS, TSA, etc.)

And I'm SOOOOO sick of these Bush butt kissers saying 150,000 jobs is Good, because "it was more than anyone expected!"

SO WHAT! How is that Good?

If I remember correctly, back to when we still had actual News, they used to say that "The Economy" needed to create 300,000 jobs per month JUST TO KEEP UP with the new people entering the work force! What ever happened to that?!? :grr:

Since this so-called "recovery" started, it's only been averaging 150,000 to 200,000 job per month, so not only are we still loosing jobs, but we NEVER did recover those 4 Million jobs we lost during the actual recession! :banghead: :rant:

[tritsofme]

12. Its generally accepted 150k jobs a month accounts for population growth

IIRC about 1.8 million jobs were created this year meaning that when accounting for population growth there were ZERO net jobs created this year, and far off into the negative for this entire presidency, despite a net gain of some 3 million of the past six years.

[cap]

19. actually it is more like 300K/month to account for population growth

yet another Bush statistic manipulated in order to hide the magnitude of the problem.

[tritsofme]

28. I have never heard 300k cited in all the years I have followed

this statistic.

If it took 300k a month to keep up with population growth then we still would have fallen over 6 million jobs short during the Clinton years, which is clearly not the case.

[Up2Late]

29. You might be right if you only go by what the MSM has been saying lately...

...but if you go back a few years, back to 2003, before the Bush Cabal started lowering economic expectation, a lot of much larger numbers were being thrown around. Check this out, it's from the Democratic Policy Committee, this is what I think I was remembering, which I think refers to getting the work force back to where it was back in March 2001:

November 13, 2003

Job Market Remains Weak Despite Modest Improvement

(clip)

Historic Job Losses

Despite modest increases of 126,000 jobs in October and 286,000 jobs over the past three months, the economy has experienced dramatic job losses since President Bush took office.

* 3 million private sector jobs have been lost since President Bush took office (total non-farm job loss is 2.3 million due to an increase in government jobs). No President since Herbert Hoover has lost jobs in his tenure in office.
* 2.6 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since President Bush took office.
* We have lost manufacturing jobs for 39 consecutive months, including 24,000 last month.
* Unless job creation accelerates over the next year, President Bush will have the worst job creation record of any President in seven decades.

The economy would need to create 326,000 jobs per month for the remainder of the Bush Administration (through January, 2005) in order for President Bush to match the jobs created under of his father's Administration, currently the President with the worst job creation rate since the Great Depression.

The economy would need to create 154,000 jobs per month for the remainder of the Bush Administration in order for President Bush to avoid losing jobs in his term (197,000 private sector jobs per month would be needed to break even by that measure)....

(clip)

...Administration lowers the bar.

Treasury Secretary John Snow has recently lowered the Administration's job growth predictions, saying that the economy will create 200,000 jobs per month over the next year. That would not be dramatic job growth. In fact, it would be lower than normal for the U.S. economy.

* Under President Clinton, the economy averaged 237,000 jobs per month over eight years. It averaged 225,000 jobs per month in Ronald Reagan's second term and 215,000 jobs per month under President Carter, when the economy was significantly smaller than it is today.
* Secretary Snow's latest estimate is actually lower than the 228,000 jobs per month that the Administration projected would be created in the second half of this year and next year if the President's latest tax plan had not been enacted....

(more at link)
<http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-new.cfm?doc_name=sr-108-1-398>

And here's a link to Population data from the 1990's and before. Unless the net population growth has dropped a lot since 1999, these figures indicate an average of approximately 2.5 Million year to year population change, which if divided by 12 months would equal a need for about 208,000 new job per month to keep pace with population growth. Why the data only goes to July 1, 1999? Your guess is as good as mine:

<http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/popclockest.txt>

June 28, 2000
------------------- National ---------- Population ------- Average Annual
--- Date --------- Population ----------- Change --------- Percent Change

July 1, 1999 ---- 272,690,813 -------- 2,442,810 ------------ 0.90
July 1, 1998 ---- 270,248,003 -------- 2,464,396 ------------ 0.92
July 1, 1997 ---- 267,783,607 -------- 2,555,035 ------------ 0.96
July 1, 1996 ---- 265,228,572 -------- 2,425,296 ------------ 0.92
July 1, 1995 ---- 262,803,276 -------- 2,476,255 ------------ 0.95
July 1, 1994 ---- 260,327,021 -------- 2,544,413 ------------ 0.99
July 1, 1993 ---- 257,782,608 -------- 2,752,909 ------------ 1.08
July 1, 1992 ---- 255,029,699 -------- 2,876,607 ------------ 1.14
July 1, 1991 ---- 252,153,092 -------- 2,688,696 ------------ 1.08
July 1, 1990 ---- 249,464,396 -------- 2,645,166 ------------ 1.07

(more at link above)

[cap]

38. I used to work at Wharton Econometrics

with Nariman Behravesh and Donald Strazheim (-- ever hear of them?)
during the Reagan administration on the unemployment statistics. The Republicans screwed around with the unemployment numbers then -- remember the unemployed soldiers? And they are screwing around with the stats now. It was my job to keep them untangled and to go back and take out all the screwed up crap that the administration forced on the American public. That way we could do reliable forecasts.

[aaronbees]

33. That totally describes my local economy

Our military depot was literally saved by the war and its role in rehabbing Humvees, etc. Other than that, the only local job growth to speak of has been in retail with my city strengthening its base as a regional retail center; even so, some of those new jobs come with the expense of more mom and pop outfits closing.

[Fridays Child]

7. k/r... I hope this makes it to the top of the Greatest page. eom

[pacalo]

9. Bush's commerce secretary says he inherited a recession???

In Clinton's first year of office -- 1993_ unemployment averaged 6.9 percent, the highest on his watch. The rate dropped to 4 percent in 2000, the lowest of his presidency and the best showing in 31 years.

Perhaps he got Clinton mixed up with Reagan, because the next sentence reads:

For Reagan, the worst annual performance was when unemployment soared to 9.7 percent in 1982 as the country suffered through a painful recession. In 1988, the rate fell to 5.5 percent.

[caligirl]

10. we've been screaming about this since before 2004!!!!! Who the H*** just unlocked

the flood gates of what B*** has been doing? Isn't there smeone here who recalls the discussions we had on this at DU. I do.

we have known for years he hasn't created the jobs numbers claimed.

[Maeve]

14. I remember, caligirl

I used to follow the unemployment figures very closely for the Stock Watch Thread. Overall, there was massive job LOSS during Dubya's first term and fiddling with the numbers since--at times, they announced great job gains based on projections, then quietly reverse the numbers later when reality set in.

I wish I still trusted the government's figures on anything...

[UpInArms]

15. I think Roland99 is keeping spreadsheets on this

and has been for quite some time.

In 2001, we were told that the Bush Tax Cuts would create two million new jobs. In 2002, the administration projected 2.5 million new jobs and in February 2003, we were told that the Bush Tax Cuts would create 3.6 million jobs.

On February 9, 2004, the Bush administration released the Economic Report of the President which was interpreted by economists to state that there would be 2.6 million jobs created in the calendar year of 2004. The following day, the President's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) said that the economists had misinterpreted the report and that there would actually be a creation of 3.8 million new jobs. The 3.8 million new jobs promised number equates to approximately 317,000 new jobs that need to be created each and every month. Despite great expectations by the Bush administration, the total jobs created for the last six months of 2003 was 366,000. However, the net job loss for 2003 was 53,000, bringing the total number of jobs lost since January 2001 to 2.2 million.

Since January 1, 2004, the following companies have announced staff reductions and mass layoffs:

AlcaTel, AllTel, American International Group (AIG), AOL, AT&T, Baltimore Maryland Schools, Best Buy, Biddeford Blankets, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Blue Ridge Paper, Boeing, Bombardier, Bon-Macy's, Bose, Cebal, Champaign County, Illionois, Cigna, Cigna Corp., City of Baltimore, Maryland, City of Benton, Illinois, City of Boston, Massachusetts, City of Chicago, Illinois, City of Chillicothe, Ohio, City of Cleveland, Ohio, City of Erie, Pennsylvania, City of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, City of Houston, Texas, City of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, City of Providence, Rhode Island, City of Salem, New Jersey, City of Sioux City, Iowa, Cooper Bussman, Covenant Medical Center, CXS, Danka Business Systems, Dickinson Hospital, Bismarck, North Dakota, Drexel Heritage, DST Systems, Earthlink, Eastman Kodak, Emisphere Technologies, Fetzer Vineyards, Ford Motors, Gradall, Hennepin County, Minnesota, Home Depot, Hoover Hanes Rubber Custom Mixing Copr., Huffy, IBM, Iowa Packing Co., Kanawha Manufacturing, KB Toys, Kraft, Madison Square Garden/Cablevision, Maytag, Meijer Foods, Monroe County, New York, National Textiles, Northampton County, New Jersey, Northwest Airlines, Ohio Casualty, One Price Clothing, PalmOne, Perdue Farms, Pillowtex, Rainbow Movers, Reliant Energy, REMEC, RJR/Brown & Williamson Tobacco, Rouge Steel, Rubbermaid, SBC, Sprint, State of California, State of Colorado - CSU Veterinary Teaching School, State of Connecticut, State of Missouri, State of Oregon, Steelcase, Subaru, Systemax, The Carrier Corp., TSYS, Tulalip Casino, Tulsa World News, TYCO, U. S. Airways, Union Institute, United States Navy - civilian employees, Walt Disney Studios, Washington Mutual, Weirton Steel Corp., Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, Wilson's Leather, Yale University Library

<snip>

The current administration is facing a net job loss of more than two million, the first administration since Herbert Hoover to fail to create jobs within the American economy.

...more...

[caligirl]

11. guterrize is recirculating the same propaganda Hannity and Colms did about the recession

Gutierrez counters, in an interview, "It's just a matter of timing and when we started getting out of the recession that the president inherited."

Backdating the Recession Redux: Hannity misled on job creation under Bush; repeated "Clinton-Gore recession" claim

On the August 31 edition of FOX News Channel's Hannity & Colmes, aired live from the Republican National Convention, co-host Sean Hannity presented misleading figures on the jobs created since George W. Bush became president. Once again, Hannity then falsely linked the 2001 recession to the Clinton administration, saying that Bush "gave us a million and a half new jobs, got us out of the Clinton-Gore recession."

Though 1.5 million jobs have been added in the last year, overall job loss has occurred during the Bush administration. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent figures, 1.8 million private sector jobs have been lost since Bush took office in January 2001. In an August 30 article, the Los Angeles Times noted (even citing the net job loss figure of 1.1 million, which includes an increase in government employment): "Bush stands to become the first post-Depression president to end his term with a net job loss."

As Media Matters for America has documented, Hannity's claim that Bush "got us out of the Clinton-Gore recession" is false. The American economy went into a recession, for the first time in ten years, in March 2001 -- after Bush became president; this is according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonpartisan organization whose business cycle announcements have long been considered the definitive word on recessions.
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:5J0mMfm97b8J:mediamatters.org/items/200409010010+Bush+rhetoric+caused+the+recession&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=9&client=firefox-a

[salin]

13. Even were it true (it isn't) - the article points out how abysmal

this admin's record is compared to Clinton and Reagan. Clinton's numbers nearly double Reagan's and the article points out that Reagan dealt with two recessions - one much worse than the one Bushjr had. Bush's dad's numbers for his four years was pretty bad compared to Clinton and Reagan - but was about the same (in four years) aas Bush has in even more years. This is one of those articles where the numbers pretty much speak for themselves.

[many a good man]

16. "Rising tide goes up your nose"

Good one, Barney!

"It has generally been an accepted fact that economic growth is a good thing and that the rising tide will lift all boats," said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts. "The 'rising tide lifts all boats' has always been a problem. If you think about that analogy, the rising tide is a very good idea if you have a boat. But if you are too poor to afford a boat and you are standing tiptoe in water, the rising tide goes up your nose. And so that's a mistake," he said.

Recession: Officially, the recession started in March 2001 and ended in November 2001. Normally there is a 12-18 month lag in policy's effect on the economy, so you can attribute the recession's start and end to Clinton.

Job growth: the article also tries to make the case that demographic trends (aging boomers) show that fewer workers are entering the work force, so the monthly job growth numbers needed should be lowered from 150,000 to 100,000. I think a stronger case can be made that discouraged workers are in greater numbers than ever before. Most economists peg the number at 125,000 new jobs per month to maintain equilibrium.

[plant]

17. And the number of jobs you need

to stay afloat in GW's economy has risen dramatically!

[ixion]

18. the job market under Bush is as bad or worse than Ray-Gun and Poppy

in fact, seems everytime there's a rethug admin, the job market and the economy both go to hell, save for a couple sectors that profit fabulously.

[elehhhhna]

20. The jobless, raise-less "recovery". What a pantload!

[The Backlash Cometh]

21. I think Bush was expecting our kids to join the Army in mass.

[Hamlette]

23. k&r n/t

[goforit]

24. Who would of thunk it!

[Megahurtz]

26. All he cares about are "Profits"

not jobs.:grr:

[cascadiance]

27. They'll start pointing out all of the new manufacturing jobs at McDonalds...

[HockeyMom]

30. Hurry up, get your brand new WalMart job

Two just opened in a 10 sq. mile radius from where I live. Dozens of openings. Great wages (minimum), great benefits (none), and wonderful working conditions (no bathroom breaks).

Ain't the job market great???????

[Up2Late]

35. Two within a 10 mile radius! That's nothing, I've got NINE (9) within 10 miles!

I've got 4 within 6 miles of where I live!

Check it out! <http://www.walmart.com/storeLocator/ca_storefinder_results.do?z=7&rx_title=com.wm.www.apps.storelocator.page.serviceLink.title.default&rx_dest=%2Findex.gsp&sfsearch_state=&sfsearch_zip=30008&sfsearch_city=>

I couldn't believe it when found the newest one (#2)(both are Wal-Mart "Superstores") because the other one (#1) is only about 2 miles from the new one and it was only built about 5 years ago! And, of course, the Kroger that was across the highway from it closed almost as soon as #2 opened. It just sick.:puke:

[lovuian]

34. Bush was a enemy of the American Worker

hands down lower wages less jobs less benefits less insurance
no minimum wage hikes
Republicans are enemies of the worker its obvious

[PurityOfEssence]

36. There are only so many burgers that need flipping

It's all service, and as workers have less to spend, less services are needed.

[yellowcanine]

37. Tell me again why we gave all those tax cuts to the wealthy? To create jobs, correct?

[Lasher]

40. S&P 500 Index Performance

Sick of hearing repeated lies about how well the economy is doing, I searched for historical annual S&P 500 performance so that I could compare Junior's performance in that respect with that of other presidents. I was surprised to have found nothing, but I compiled source data myself and built it onto a spreadsheet.

Based on closing prices on the last trading day of each year, the average annual gain of the S&P 500 during the six years of Junior's presidency was 2.59%.

Clinton: 15.86%.
Poppy: 12.63%
Saint Ronnie: 9.87%
Carter: 7.07%

The S&P 500 reached its last all-time closing high of 1,527 on March 24, 2000 and has not since reached this benchmark. The average annual gain under Clinton was greater than the combined total of all Juniors six years in office.

Source data was derived here:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=%5EGSPC

Based on this and other indicators, such as employment statistics that have been shared in this thread, there is no "Bush Boom" as I recently heard a pundit claim. The numbers are so bad it's hard to imagine how any person capable of rational thinking could keep a straight face while making such an assertion.