The Bureau of Labor Statistics
announced on Friday that July saw a gain of a mere 32,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. This was far below the predictions of various experts, including the Bush administration. In response to this news, Republican pollster David Winston had a
cute quote about why the American public shouldn't doubt Bush's effectiveness based on July's numbers: "It's like if you have a baseball player like Barry Bonds and he goes 0 for 4 one day and you decide to trade him, as opposed to looking at the totality of his performance for the entire season."
I agree with David. I think it's only fair that Bush be judged on the entirety of his record, not just on a single month of data. So I looked over some various economic information (much of it from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and came up with some interesting conclusions on my blog. I'll repost them here:
Let's look first at the statistic that gets the most play: the number of nonfarm payroll jobs. When Bush took office in January of 2001, there were 132,388,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. With the July numbers, we now have 131,272,000 nonfarm payroll jobs. That's a loss of 1,116,000 jobs over the last three and a half years. That's an average loss of 26,571 jobs per month.
Now, if we wanted to simply keep even with the job market we had in January of 2001, we would have needed to add an average of 150,000 jobs each month. That would have kept us even with the growing population, giving a job to every new person looking for one. Instead, we have lost over 26,000 jobs per month on average. That means that every month, we are essentially 176,000 jobs behind where we need to be at the very minimum.
But who ever said we were shooting for the very minimum? Not the Bush administration. They have predicted decent job growth throughout the years--and have failed every prediction. In 2002, the administration projected 138.3 million nonfarm payroll jobs by July 2004. As I mentioned before, we're at 131,272,000 jobs. That's about 7 million jobs short of projection. But wait--that was in 2002. What about 2003? Well, the administration downgraded and forecast 135.2 million jobs by July 2004. That's a little better--now we're only about 4 million jobs short of projection.
So what about the 2004 projections? That was less than a year ago, so surely the Bush administration gave a more realistic projection. I mean, they can't be completely out of touch with reality, right? Well, the projection was more realistic than previous ones by the administration, but that doesn't mean it was actually realistic. The administration projected 132.7 million jobs by July 2004 (conveniently, just a few hundred thousand jobs above the number we had when Bush came into office.) Unfortunately, we're still a little more than 1.4 million jobs short of that goal. The Bush administration just can't seem to quite get those numbers right.
But then, perhaps that's because Bush isn't a statistician (though, presumably, his White House Council of Economic Advisers might have one or two of those on staff.)
So the nonfarm employment levels don't seem very good. What about general unemployment? It turns out that in January 2001, the unemployment rate was 4.2 percent. In July 2004, the unemployment rate was 5.5 percent. That's an increase of 1.3 percentage points, which is an overall 31% increase in unemployment since Bush took office. In hard numbers, that translates to 5,997,000 unemployed people in January 2001 and 8,196,000 unemployed people in July 2004. Over Bush's three and a half years in office, that's 2,199,000 new people who are unemployed, which is a 36.7% increase. On average, 52,357 people have become unemployed each month since Bush took office.
So we definitely have some job loss going on. But what kind of jobs are being lost? Looking at the numbers, it would appear that manufacturing is taking much of the hit. When Bush took office in January 2001, there were 16,993,000 manufacturing jobs. As of last month, there were 14,427,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States. That's a loss of 2,566,000 manufacturing jobs since Bush took office, which is an average loss of 61,095 manufacturing jobs per month. 15% of our manufacturing jobs have disappeared. But I suppose that's okay because the Bush administration tells us that outsourcing is "probably a plus."
I still don't feel like we understand the "totality" of Bush's performance. Let's step away from the number of jobs for a moment and look at what kinds of jobs people are getting. Let's start with median incomes. Are people making more money or less money since Bush took office? According to the Census Bureau, less money. The median household income in 2000 was $43,848 (adjusted for inflation and put into 2002 dollars.) In 2002 (the most recent data available) the median household income was $42,409. That's a $1,439 decrease in median household income, which is a 3.3% decrease. The picture doesn't look much better for family household. The median family household income was $54,001 in 2000 (again, adjusted for inflation.) In 2002, that dropped down to $52,704, which is $1,297 less and is a 2.4% decrease. I bet that money sure would come in handy right about now to help pay the increased cost of gas.
But hey, maybe it isn't all bad. Perhaps the median income has gone down, but there are less people in poverty. That would certainly be good. Unfortunately, the exact opposite is true. There are considerably more individuals and families living in poverty now. Again looking at Census Bureau numbers, we see that in 2000, there were 31,581,000 individuals living in poverty. In 2002, that number had increased to 34,570,000. That's a 9.5% increase, which equals 2,989,000 new people living in poverty.
If we look only at individuals living in familes, the numbers are just as bad. In 2000, 22,347,000 people in families were living in poverty. By 2002, that number had jumped to 24,534,000--a 9.8% increase that equals 2,187,000 new people in families living in poverty. Not good.
We'll take a look at one last bit of data. According to a chart (.pdf) put together by the Economic Policy Institute, the average wage of the growing industries in the United State is $35,410 while the average wage of the shrinking industries is $44,570. So we not only have an anemic job market with poor growth, but the growth that is occurring is in lower-wage industries while the higher-wage industries are shrinking. It makes perfect sense, considering the median income and poverty levels I just quoted.
So there you go. While I wouldn't call this a truly complete look at Bush's economic record, it does give some sense of what he has done for the American economy. Looking at the "totality of his performance," I would say Bush is not the man I want leading my country's economy. I'll let you look at the numbers and decide if you agree or not.