More on the Treasury junk chart

Today, the NYT's Edmund Andrews further devastates the Treasury Department's junk chart claiming President Bush's tax cuts stimulated impressive job growth, which I debunked last week:

THE Bush administration has begun an aggressive campaign to reassure Americans that the economy is doing well. It is highlighting the jobs numbers, which have shown steady gains since hitting a low in May 2003.

The chart shown with this article is part of that campaign. Released by the Treasury Department after the November employment report, the Treasury public relations office said that the chart "illustrates the strong job growth and falling unemployment rate since the president's economic policies have come into effect."

It added that "the American economy has created 4.4 million new jobs and the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.0 percent - well below the historical average - since the president signed the jobs and growth bill into law in May of 2003"...

By invoking historical averages, President Bush may have invited comparisons that do not make the recovery look so good. In terms of job creation, the recovery from the 2001 recession has been one of the slowest since World War II.

Four years after the recession ended, the unemployment rate is 5 percent, which is lower than at a similar point after all but one previous recession. But the decline has been slower than in most recoveries, and the rate remains well above the 4.2 percent rate in January 2001, when Mr. Bush took office.

In terms of economic growth, this recovery ranks eighth for the four-year period after the official end of a recession, as measured by the National Bureau of Economic Research. It is just better than the period after the previous recession, under the first President Bush, ended in 1991, and considerably better than the period after the first recession in the Eisenhower administration. Then, a new recession began three years and three months after the first one ended.

The recovery that began in 1991 became the longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in American history, an indication that there is nothing wrong with a slow start. But the current recovery so far is far from impressive.

Consider jobs, the focus of the Treasury chart. A unique aspect is that the job count continued to fall for 18 months after the 2001 recession ended. The number of jobs in November was up 3.4 percent from the job low 30 months earlier.

That measurement, which is the way the Bush administration chose to look at the data, ranks eighth among the 10 postwar recessions, a fraction ahead of the recovery after the 1990-91 recession, and better than the period after the recession that ended in July 1980, when another recession followed a year later.

Were job growth instead to be measured from the end of the recession, this recovery is the slowest ever, with the job count up 2.6 percent in four years. The previous low was a 4 percent gain in the four years after the 1953-54 downturn.

Any analysis of the recovery after the 2001 recession must ask why huge tax cuts that began in 2001 had so little - and so long delayed - effect. That is not a discussion the Bush administration embarked upon this week.

For more, click here to see the useful graphic that accompanies the story (it's too large to display here). Yes, this is one of the weakest recoveries since World War, but you wouldn't know it from reading the conservative press. The number of hits on the phrase "Bush boom" on nationalreview.com? Thousands.

Comments

It's just like Bush. He could make a defensible claim, that the economy is good because GDP growth has been good, but instead he goes for the big lie and claims job growth has been good. Just like he could have made a defensible case for going to Iraq but had to bring up imaginary nukes instead.