You're used to being lied to by now, aren't you?
Quote of note:
The Economic Policy Institute found that all but two states Hawaii and Wyoming failed to make the projections put forth by the administration. Twenty-nine states both blue and red states have fewer jobs than when the recession started in March 2001. The other states experienced job growth so anemic that the added jobs could not keep up with the expansion of the workforce as a whole. Overall, the promise of 5.5 million jobs fell 3.1 million jobs short one of the worst job-creation records in the past century (the president s best chance to burnish his record is to compare himself to Herbert Hoover).As important, wages are stagnating which explains why people remain very nervous about the economy. As EPI reports in a related analysis: Since the recovery s start in the fourth quarter of 2001, (real) private wage and salary income is up only 3.9 percent. The average for all economic recoveries that lasted 11 quarters or more from 1947 to1982 is 18.2 percent, and even the jobless recovery of the early 1990s saw 7.4 percent growth.
February 01, 2005
Last week, the Congressional Budget Office revealed the U.S. deficit has reached staggering levels and that s without calculating the cost of the ongoing occupation in Iraq. Among his priorities this year, President George W. Bush wants to make his tax cuts permanent. Not only do these tax cuts heap billions onto our national debt, but Jonathan Tasini explains that the evidence shows they don t produce the jobs his administration claims they will.
Jonathan Tasini is president of the Economic Future Group and writes his "Working In America" columns for TomPaine.com on an occasional basis.
When the president delivers the State of the Union address, he will lie. He will tell the American people that his tax cuts have helped people get jobs and boosted the economy as a whole. And he will use those untruths to push Congress to make his tax cuts permanent.
Let s go way back in history three years to the Bush administration s so-called Jobs and Growth Plan. (Do journalists on the administration s payroll come up with those Orwellian slogans?) The administration s Council on Economic Advisers claimed the plan would create 5.5 million jobs by the end of 2004. In his State of the Union address a year ago, the president himself said that, due to his tax cuts, Productivity is high, and jobs are on the rise. And then he said, For the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be permanent.
So understand, the president was trying to make you believe that his tax cuts mean more jobs. Rubbish. Here s what he claimed originally for his phony plan: The tax cuts alone would yield 1.4 million jobs, along with another 4.1 million jobs that would result from other policies. But pesky facts cause problems for this administration.
