KRUGMAN: No More Excuses on Jobs

[dw]

Published: March 12, 2004 in The New York Times

As job growth continues to elude the U.S. economy, we're hearing two main excuses from the Bush administration and its supporters: that the real situation is much better than you're hearing, and that to the extent employment is lagging, it's the result of factors outside the administration's control. But after three years of extravagant promises and dismal results, the time for excuses has passed.

Let's start with the real job situation. A number of readers have asked me about what Marc Racicot, who heads the Bush re-election effort, told Don Imus the other day. He claimed that those miserable job numbers are misleading, and that another survey presents both a more accurate and a much happier story. You can find the same claim all over the right-wing media. But it just isn't so.

It's true that there are two employment surveys, which have been diverging lately. The establishment survey, which asks businesses how many workers they employ, says that 2.4 million jobs have vanished in the last three years. The household survey, which asks individuals whether they have jobs, says that employment has actually risen by 450,000. The administration's supporters, understandably, prefer the second number.

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[grannylib]

1. They're playing with these numbers just like the numbers of dead in Iraq

by whisking wounded off for treatment even if already dead, and if they are going to be treated, they must still be alive, right, and so if they die after they went for treatment, it must have been something OTHER than the war that killed them, so they don't get counted as being dead in Iraq...
Kind of like that, right???

[Pale_Rider]

2. To quote the beast ...

"If Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two-to-three years, the kind of tax increases both Kerry and Edwards are talking about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had."

[mhr]

3. Already Forwarded The Op-ed Piece To My Email Tree

Got to keep getting the word out!

Got to keep getting the word out!

Got to keep getting the word out!

[Melodybe]

4. Yes, we do

I am doing crazy work here in MS, people are pissed. Around here their is hardly any middle class left. Good, decent hard working people have seen their jobs leave the country or given to some lazy good'ole boy asshole and they are foaming at the mouth to get rid of Bush!

[Beetwasher]

5. Dems Should Start Claiming UE is Really 7.4%

Let the Repubs try to explain the difference and why it's not until people's eyes glaze over...

"We don't know why so many people have stopped looking for jobs, but it probably has something to do with the fact that jobs are so hard to find: 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work more than 15 weeks, a 20-year record. In any case, the administration should feel grateful that so many people have dropped out. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, if they hadn't dropped out, the official unemployment rate would be an eye-popping 7.4 percent, not a politically spinnable 5.6 percent."

[ashling]

7. I wish someone would 'splain to me

how they decide that someone has "stopped looking for work."

When your extended extended benefits run out and you are no longer filing for unemployment?

Maybe that's the reason that they don't want to extend benefits.
.


.
:hurts:

[TopesJunkie]

6. Krugman's honesty is scary.

Thank goodness he hasn't been run out of town -- yet!

[priller]

8. He's not in town to begin with

so you can't run him out. Krugman is not one of the gaggle of DC journalists -- which is one reason why his reporting is so different. He doesn't depend on "access" or good relations with the administration's media handlers. He sits in his office and Princeton and simply dissects the Bushies' official pronouncements to reveal them for the pack of lies they are.