#68 – Spreading Bull Doesn't Change the Bear Market

Every American who pays federal income taxes benefited from the Bush tax cuts, and so has our economy. For the last 11 consecutive months we've created jobs -- since last August, about 1.5 million new jobs.

Vice President Dick Cheney
Remarks by the Vice President at a Victory 2004 Rally
Pottsville, Pennsylvania
August 25, 2004

Cheney is too smart to sound stupid on the campaign trail. Instead, he lies:

"Every American who pays federal income taxes benefited from the Bush tax cuts …."

President George W. Bush's tax cuts have transferred the federal tax burden from the richest Americans to middle-class families, with one-third of the cuts benefiting people with the top 1 percent of income, according to a government report cited in newspapers Friday.

[. . .]

Taxpayers whose incomes range from $51,500 to about $75,600 saw their share of federal tax payments increase, according to CBO figures cited by The Washington Post. (CNN)

". . .and so has our economy."

The White House continues to claim its tax cuts have brought an economic recovery to the nation. In the short term, the tax cuts did modestly boost consumer spending.

But the jury's still out on a larger economic recovery. The administration is quick to latch onto positive news, but slow to explain the less-than-stellar economic news.

[. . .]

There is also the matter of the government's record deficit, created in part by an increase in war spending and the cost of the Bush tax cuts. Smarter minds than us are warning that the administration has boxed itself in. It can't cut taxes again to spur more job growth and the Fed isn't likely to drop interest rates to help the economy heat back up.

There are plenty of morals to this economic story, the most obvious being the nation's need to wean itself from foreign oil.

The other is that a president up for re-election can't jawbone the country into believing in an economic recovery. Especially when the economic numbers still show a bear, not a bull. (The Saginaw (MI) News)

"For the last 11 consecutive months we've created jobs -- since last August, about 1.5 million new jobs."

This one may be technically true, but it ignores the full picture:

The economy has 1.1 million fewer jobs than the day Bush took office, making it more than likely he will join Herbert Hoover as the second president to see the nation suffer a net job loss on his watch. The economy is 7 million jobs short of the level the White House had predicted when trying to sell the tax cuts.

[. . .]

"The economy is strong, and it's getting better," Bush said in the Oval Office on Monday, repeating a months-old mantra from the campaign trail. "In spite of a recession, emergency, attacks, war and corporate scandals, we're growing, and growing quite substantially. We've added nearly 1.5 million jobs over the last 12 months."

The president did not mention that those went toward replacing 2.6 million that were lost during his term. (Washington Post)

Employers added 32,000 workers to their payrolls in July, the smallest monthly gain since December and the fourth consecutive month in which the pace of job growth has slowed, the Labor Department reported.

Hiring also was weaker in May and June than previously thought, according to the department's revisions of earlier figures, which sliced 61,000 jobs off the earlier totals. That means the economy added an average of 106,000 jobs a month since May, far below the 150,000 monthly pace many economists believe is needed to keep up with population growth. (Washington Post)

The economic numbers are bad enough - the manipulation of the facts is worse.