#9 - The Final Countdown: The Economy

Highlights - or rather, low points - from President Bush's handling of the economy:

July 2003: White House budget director Joshua Bolten says not to worry: “The U.S. economy is poised to return to healthy, sustained growth….There is a substantial stimulative effect to the tax cuts that have been introduced.”

August 2003: He cut the pay raises that most civilian federal employees were to receive in January 2004.

September 2003: The Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans living in poverty increased by 1.7 million last year, and the median household income declined by 1.1 percent.

January 2004: President Bush announced plans to establish a permanent human settlement on the moon and to set a goal of eventually sending Americans to Mars.

Officials were unwilling to provide cost figures or details and would say only that Bush will direct the government to immediately begin research and development to establish a human presence or base on the moon, with the goal of having that lead to a manned mission to Mars.

January 2004: Bush pushed a package of tax credits that he said would create 2.5 million jobs by February. About 294,000 jobs have been added since the tax cuts took effect last June.

August 2004: The U.S. trade deficit hit a record $55.8 billion in June as the country's foreign oil bill surged to an all-time high.

September 2004: The expansive agenda President Bush laid out at the Republican National Convention was missing a price tag, but administration figures show the total is likely to be well in excess of $3 trillion over a decade.

A staple of Bush's stump speech is his claim that his Democratic challenger, John F. Kerry, has proposed $2 trillion in long-term spending, a figure the Massachusetts senator's campaign calls exaggerated. But the cost of the new tax breaks and spending outlined by Bush at the GOP convention far eclipses that of the Kerry plan.

Bush's pledge to make permanent his tax cuts, which are set to expire at the end of 2010 or before, would reduce government revenue by about $1 trillion over 10 years, according to administration estimates. His proposed changes in Social Security to allow younger workers to invest part of their payroll taxes in stocks and bonds could cost the government $2 trillion over the coming decade, according to the calculations of independent domestic policy experts.

And Bush's agenda has many costs the administration has not publicly estimated. For instance, Bush said in his speech that he would continue to try to stabilize Iraq and wage war on terrorism. The war in Iraq alone costs $4 billion a month, but the president's annual budget does not reflect that cost.

October 2004: It is now a certainty that Mr. Bush will be the first president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to go into an election with a net decline in jobs over a single term.

And there's more: during the Bush years, take-home pay, as a share of the economy, has fallen to its lowest level since 1929, when the government started keeping records. Corporate profits have grown faster - and wages and salaries far less - than in all other eight recoveries since World War II.

Mr. Bush tries to keep the focus on the job growth in the last year. But that has done little to erase the monthly losses that dominated the first nearly two years of the recovery. And the rate of job creation lately has barely kept pace with growth in the labor force. It has been well below the average of all post-World War II recoveries in all but March and April, when it was just above average. Last month, the economy needed to add about 300,000 jobs, rather than 96,000, just to hit the average.