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Dems Blame Unemployment Woes on Bush, but Some Economists Disagree
By Christine Hall, Senior Staff Writer CNSNews.com
September , 2003
News of layoffs and high unemployment make headlines and give Democratic presidential candidates talking points. Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt, for example, has accused the Bush administration of presiding over "the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover."
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics reported last week that 134,000 workers were laid off last month in 1,258 mass layoffs (of more than 50 workers in a single month).
Meanwhile, unemployment is 6.1 percent, according to the BLS, compared to 4.5 percent five years ago.
But economists like Robert D. Reischauer of the Urban Institute, a former CBO director, say the president isn't to blame.
"The fact of the matter is that the Bush administration couldn't have done much more to combat the weakness in the economy than it did over the last three years," said Reischauer.
"We have passed a great deal of fiscal stimulus, both in the form of tax cuts and in the form of increased spending," said Reischauer.
"I don't know if there's much of anything the president can do policy-wise to change the job situation between now and the election, given the lags of how long it takes to implement policies and how long it takes for those policies to have an impact," agreed Bruce Bartlett, an economist at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).
"We've already cut taxes twice, sent out rebates twice, [and] the defense spending is pumping a huge amount of money into the economy. We've lengthened unemployment benefits. The Fed has cut interest rates to the lowest levels in my lifetime," Bartlett said.
Democratic candidates, however, continue to pound away at the so-called "jobless recovery."
Gephardt, along with former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), for example, have called for rolling back the Bush income-tax rate cuts but have said they'd spend the extra cash on universal health care and, in Dean's and Kerry's case, education.
And now, public opinion may be trending away from Bush.
A Newsweek poll conducted last week showed that 55 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Bush is handling the economy (compared to 46 percent who disapprove of the way he's handling Iraq). However, a slight majority, 52 percent, said they approve of the president overall.
"The person occupying the White House gets blamed for everything that goes wrong while he is in that position and gets credit for everything that goes right, whether or not that individual or his policies have anything to do with what goes right or goes wrong," Reischauer observed.
But Bartlett predicts that by November 2004, the prevailing political analysis could be a different story.
"The timing of the business cycle is such that more than likely, the economy will be in much better shape this time next year," said Bartlett. "All previous recessions have ended eventually."
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