Bad News for Rove’s Election Plan
First, read this story from three days ago:
May 30 (Bloomberg) — Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s top political adviser, laid out a plan to win the 2002 congressional elections by stressing national security. For 2006, Rove is framing a strategy for Republicans to sell the U.S. economy.In a recent speech, Rove argued that Bush’s policies of tax cuts and trade agreements had pulled the nation out of recession, created millions of jobs, boosted productivity and increased disposable income. That record can help lead Republicans to victory in November, Rove said in the May 15 speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Oops. Now check out this New York Times story from today:
The American economy added a surprisingly weak number of jobs in May, a sign that nervousness over a cooling economy may be spreading among the nation’s employers.The net increase in nonfarm payrolls in May — 75,000 — is a significant falloff from April, when the Labor Department estimates that 126,000 jobs were added, a figure it revised downward today from the 138,000 it initially reported.
Anything below about 150,000 net new jobs a month is regarded as too slow to keep up with population growth, so in effect, workers are losing ground.
The Labor Department statistics were the latest in a series of recent reports pointing to a slowdown in the expansion of the economy.
This is just more of their typical B.S. Every figure for new job creation for the past six or seven months has been revised downward - in most cases significantly from the originally announced figure. Right now, the current level of "job growth" isn't even sufficient to cover the number of people entering the job market for the first time, not to mention all those people out there who've been looking for quite some time without success. That's why the unemployment rate has been so low: hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Americans have just given up trying to find anything resembling "living wage" employment, and are settling for low-wage service sector jobs.
And people wonder why the Dow Jones keeps bouncing up-and-down like a Super Ball thrown by a shot putter...