some recovery

Following last week's underwhelming jobs report, Smartmoney.com's Scott Patterson interviewed the Economic Policy Institute's Lawrence Mishel for answers to some pretty direct questions about the Bush team's economic policies and, more specifically, the effect of Bush's policies on unemployment. What he got in return was a stinging economic indictment of the Bush administration's 'plan'... their words vs. their actions... reality vs. their spin... and economic impact vs. campaign rhetoric. He exposes, again in this case, that what the Bush administration says must be taken with extreme caution. here's an excerpt:

SM: How have policies by the Bush administration, such as the tax cuts, affected the job market? LM: Some people say that a president doesn't have much affect on jobs and growth. Whatever the case is for most presidents, this president has said that his plan was going to create a lot of jobs. And he has been able to radically restructure the tax system to lock in trillions of dollars of tax cuts, both in 2001 and 2003. There's actually a great parallel between what's happened with the war in Iraq and taxes. It seems to me that in both cases, there was a policy that the administration wanted to pursue, whatever arguments got them there were the ones they used. So in the November 2000 election, he said we want to put money back in your pockets because of the huge surplus. Then it was the same tax cuts because we were going into a recession. Their tax policies have never really been driven by the urge to create jobs in the short term. Rather it was an effort to reshape the tax structure to lessen taxes on income from wealth. The tax proposals that they issued didn't make sense as a short-term job stimulus. There were no economists who thought the reduction of taxes on dividends would be good for short-term job growth. In 2003, the president promised that if we passed the tax cuts, we would generate 300,000 jobs a month. He's actually averaged at best half that, and we're more than 2 1/2 million jobs behind the administration's target of nearly four million new jobs added by now. So by their own criteria, their policies have failed.

full article: What Happened to the Jobs? see also: The State of Working America 2004-2005