Bush and Employment

Here’s a link to Paul Krugman’s blog at the New York Times: Op-Ed Columnist – Paul Krugman Blog

He asks a very valid question: why was George Bush’s record on employment so bad? When you look at the month to month job generation that took place over the past eight years you are struck by how weak the numbers are. There were only a few months during which employment growth came close to the monthly average of the Clinton administration, and there were no peaks anywhere close to high points of that era.

The vaunted tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 did not deliver a healthy economy. Economic growth was entirely average subsequently. The entire Bush era pales by comparison with the Clinton era and is not even up to snuff with the average post World War II period. Not just employment fell short. Wages did too.

Bush’s legendary incompetence and his total lack of interest would have left us with a weakened economy even if the disaster brought on by his administration’s inept deregulation hadn’t spun us into our current downturn.

It really takes some doing to create the train wreck that Bush is leaving us with. He surely gets marks for the epic proportions of the disaster he wrought.

We need to be very clear headed about assigning blame. While presidents should not be fully blamed for everything that occurs on their watch … Clinton was lucky as well as astute, while Bush was unlucky as well as stupid … the overall shape of an economy over eight full years is attributable to the policies that a president signs into law. There is no getting away from Bush’s deregulatory bias. More potently: where he didn’t specifically deregulate he undermined. The SEC is an example. He did very little actual deregulation of SEC matters, instead he allowed that agency to atrophy. During a period of immense innovation and expansion in the financial sector he let the number of SEC auditors decline by over a 1,000. It was his neglect of government caused by his extreme anti-government ideology that is a more direct cause of today’s disaster, especially the Madoff scandal.

So while we have to wait for future studies of the Bush era to explain more fully his failure, that he failed is beyond dispute.

Obama has very tiny shoes to fill, but awesome problems to overcome. The employment outlook being high on the list.