New York Daily News
February 4, 2004
<snip>
The Bush administration has a big problem. Last year, the President and his aides promised that their tax cut would give America what it needed most: jobs. Never happened. Total job creation was supposed to average out at 306,000 a month, but not even a third of that has been achieved. The numbers clearly undercut the Bush claim that tax cuts for the wealthy would generate jobs for the middle and working classes.
The jobless recovery we're now in is unlike anything the American economy has ever seen. Typically, the Great American Job Machine energizes our economy. New jobs beget more income, which begets more spending, which begets more hiring, incomes and spending. What we're seeing now, however, suggests that there may be something fundamentally wrong in the engine room of the American economy.
In the recoveries of the mid-1970s and 1980s, America was generating about 300,000 new jobs a month within six months of cyclical upturns. In the early 1990s, this expansion slowed to about 200,000 a month, and we had to wait a full two years for that.
This time, we have seen not a deceleration in job creation, but a net loss - the sharpest in any period since the Great Depression, especially in manufacturing. No work and not much in the way of wage increases either. Ouch!
Full Text