Friday, August 06, 2004

Bush Turns Wrong Corner On The Economy

Results do matter, and they aren't helping George Bush's reelection chances. Today's unemployment numbers provide further evidence of the failure of Bush's economic policies, as previous predictions have had to be scaled back.

Even the Wall Street Journal realizes how bad this is for Bush--note the last line of the first paragraph below. This is from the WSJ Online's Afternoon Report:

August 6, 2004 -- 12:43 p.m. EDT

U.S. Job Growth
Slows to a Crawl

By JOSEPH SCHUMAN
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE


Today's employment report from the U.S. Labor Department is bad news any way you look at it. The sharp deceleration of job growth in July is symptomatic of an economy that seems to have burned off the pent-up need for new workers that generated a hiring spree earlier this year, and it doesn't bode well for the consumer spending needed to fuel economic growth moving forward. It will also make it harder for President Bush to campaign on the notion that the U.S. economy has turned the corner.

Nonfarm business payrolls grew by just 32,000 last month, the government said. That's the smallest increase since December. It's well below the level of roughly 150,000 that many economists consider necessary for the work force to absorb new people entering the labor pool, let alone the more than one million who lost their jobs since the 2001 recession and haven't yet been rehired. Moreover, the government said June's weak job creation was more feeble than previously thought. It revised June payroll growth down to 78,000 from 112,000, and revised May job growth down to 208,000 from 235,000. The separate, less-regarded household survey showed a better picture: an unemployment rate that edged lower to 5.5% from 5.6% in June, and a labor-force participation rate that rose to 66.2% from 66%. But the household survey also found that the number of discouraged workers -- defined as those who aren't looking for a job because they believe none are available -- shot up to 504,000 from just 478,000 in June, near a 10-year high.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Check some of your Heinz products. "Sen. John
Kerry keeps talking about U.S. corporations leaving
this country and setting up shop in foreign
countries, taking thousands of jobs with them.
He is right, because that has happened.
However, he is trying to blame George W. Bush. As far as I
know, Bush has not moved one factory out of this
country because he is not the owner of a single
factory. That cannot be said about Kerry and his
wife, Teresa Heinz-Kerry. According to the Wall Street
Journal, the Kerry's own 32 factories in Europe and
18 in Asia and the Pacific.
In addition, their company, the Heinz Company,
leases four factories in Europe and four in Asia.
Also, they own 27 factories in North America, some of
which are in Mexico and the Caribbean. 80% of Heinz
products are made overseas. I wonder how many
hundreds of American workers lost their jobs when
these plants relocated in foreign countries. I also
wonder if the workers in Mexico and Asia are paid the
same wages and benefits as workers in the United
States. Of course they're not. However, Kerry demands
that other companies that relocate should pay the same
benefits they did in the U.S. Why does he not demand
this of the Heinz Company, since he is married to the
owner? If Kerry is elected, will he and his wife close
all those foreign factories and bring all those jobs
back to America? Of course they won't. They're making
millions off that cheap labor.
Thank you and make your vote count....

4:43 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home