WE'RE IN HIS DEBT

Show us the jobs:

Since the tax cuts took effect in July 2003, the administration’s projected monthly job growth was only met or exceeded three times. In every other month—according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute —the projection was way off by tens of thousands of jobs. In more than half of the 18 months the tax cuts have been a factor, the job projections fell short by more than 200,000 jobs. July 2003 marked the biggest shortfall with 351,000 fewer jobs recorded than the Bush administration projected as a result of its tax cuts.

The Economic Policy Institute found that all but two states—Hawaii and Wyoming—failed to make the projections put forth by the administration. Twenty-nine states—both blue and red states—have fewer jobs than when the recession started in March 2001. The other states experienced job growth so anemic that the added jobs could not keep up with the expansion of the workforce as a whole. Overall, the promise of 5.5 million jobs fell 3.1 million jobs short—one of the worst job-creation records in the past century (the president’s best chance to burnish his record is to compare himself to Herbert Hoover).

As important, wages are stagnating—which explains why people remain very nervous about the economy. As EPI reports in a related analysis: “Since the recovery’s start in the fourth quarter of 2001, (real) private wage and salary income is up only 3.9 percent. The average for all economic recoveries that lasted 11 quarters or more from 1947 to1982 is 18.2 percent, and even the “jobless recovery” of the early 1990s saw 7.4 percent growth.”
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But certainly—with the past experience laid out for all to see—the public should not buy any State of the Union claims that more tax cuts will help create more jobs. There is, in fact, an argument to be made that the president’s tax cuts have contributed to job losses because of large annual deficits and the crushing financial burden passed on to state government budgets. When state governments are struggling, the private sector—particularly small business—is burdened. And that says nothing of the long-term consequences resulting from the additional 10 trillion dollars of additional long-term debt over 10 years that Bush will saddle us with if his tax cuts are made permanent. As Citizens for Tax Justice  points out, because of the Bush tax cuts, “By 2013 and thereafter, the government is likely to be spending more on interest on the debt than on all domestic appropriations put together—from education, to the environment, to law enforcement, to science, to transportation, to veterans.”

In that sense, George W. Bush will leave office with generations of Americans in his debt—deeply in debt for generations to come.