Total Payroll Jobs(May, 2003, emphasis in the orginal.)
May 2000 - 131.9 million.
May 2001 - 132.2 million.
May 2002 - 130.3 million.
May 2003 - 129.8 million.
May 2004 - 131.4 million.
May 2005 - 133.4 million.
Dec 2005 - 134.5 million.
My response? The figures are impressive---Not! The figures show just how bad the Bush Administration's stewardship has been.
On the chart, there are 31 months shown after May of 2003. In that period, the average monthly increase in jobs was over 151,000. What does this figure mean?
First, the economy needs to add somewhere between 135,000 and 150,000 jobs just to "stay even." That is, the total number of working Americans has to increase by that amount merely to keep up with a growing population. Thus, even in the limited period selected, job growth is merely treading water.
Second, it means that Bush comes in a distant second to Bill Clinton. During the 96 months of the Clinton Administration (measuring the statistics from March of 1993 to March of 2001), the country added, on average, over 235,000 jobs a month. That is, with a smaller population, Cinton did more than 55% better, on average, in each and every month of his administration than Bush did in the best partial slice of his administration.
Let's go one step further. Look at the best slice shown by the chart, May, 2004 to May, 2005. It shows job increases to average only 167,000 per month. (In the last 7 month slice shown, job grown falls to the low 150,000 average. Again, back to treading water.)
Of course, we could take the Bush Administration's performance as a whole, with a average monthly average increase in jobs of just over 38,000. But I doubt that PoliPundit wants to go there.
Here's a chart, created by the Bureau of Labor Statistics website, on the total number of non-farm payroll jobs from 1993 to 2005:
(Click image to enlarge.)
As a graph, the chart looks like this:
(Again, click image to enlarge.)
Analysing the statistics in another way, the total number of Americans working increased by over 20.5% during the Clinton Administration, an average 0.213% monthly increase. During the first 54 months of the Bush Administration, the increase has been a paltry 1.5%, or an average monthly 0.028% increase. Even looking at the limited time period that PoliPundit points to, the average monthly percentage increase is only 0.116%, or significantly less than the Clinton Administration's 96 month average percentage increase.
Today (January 9, 2006), Kleinrock (subscription required) reported that:
Citing the 108,000 new jobs created last month as evidence that tax relief bolsters the economy, President Bush on January 6th blasted congressional Democrats during his speech before the Economic Club of Chicago for wanting to stop all tax cutting activity to stem the growth of the deficit.Just one more time: If you create only 108,000 new jobs a month, the economy is losing ground. Daddy Bush and then Bill Clinton raised taxes. The result was the steep upward slant in the graph in the middle of this post.
(By the way, the consensus estimate with respect to the December new jobs figure was about 200,000. My guess is that the 108,000 reported by the BLS is actually low and that either January's number will be much higher or the revised December figure will shoot up, with the final result being that the average of the two months will hit at about the 200,000 estimate.)