With the “war” going so badly, the Republicans need the economy to be doing well. Expect sunny economic predictions to continue up until Novemeber 2006…

It’s hard to imagine the Democrats could have done any worse…

I mean, I, for one, find it difficult to imagine the Democrats doing any better in terms of keeping spending down, creating jobs, “low paying” or otherwise, or making government smaller. The first and last are the really hilarious ones.

(We were better off when “The Democrats Were Running Things”? I see. I suppose that the internet bubble had nothing to do with that, and it was the fact that the President’s party started with D?

Come now. Sensible people admit that apart from doing stupid things to ruin it (cf Nixon’s price controls), Presidents really have little power over the economy directly. The business cycle ring a bell?

Do you seriously mean to imply that the late 90s economy is due to some action on the part of Bill Clinton or possibly his Democrat allies in Congress [though they weren't much in "charge"]? If so, could you share those deep insights with the rest of us, so we can see how Bush got it wrong by not doing whatever magic things Clinton did?)

(And the economy “lost” a million jobs between June and July?

Yeah, it did, in the unadjusted numbers. And here’s the funny thing.

It did that between June and July Every year since 1995 (except 1999) – that’s 9 of the 10 years available – and it probably did that even earlier, but BLS is only showing me data to 1995. Was it Bush’s fault when the economy “lost a million jobs” in July of 1997? Or was it Bill Clinton’s fault? Or… nobody’s fault at all?

Go on. I can wait for the explanation.)

On the plus side, I can bake a potato(e) under it in less than an hour while keeping out Karl Rove’s mind control waves…

How’s the new hat working out for you?

Let’s assume a government department run by Elaine Chou, former Heritage Foundation Fellow and wife of Republican Senate Whip Mitch McConnell, would never cook the books to make the economy look better than it really is. And let’s assume that even though we lost 1,200,000 jobs in July, we actually gained 207,000 jobs. What kind of jobs were they? Here’s the numbers from the BLS:

207,000 new jobs
-26,000 government jobs

That leaves 181,000 new private sector jobs created in July. What kind of jobs were those?

50,000 Retails Sales Clerk jobs
30,000 Food & Beverage Server jobs
28,000 Health Care jobs
12,000 Real Estate agent jobs

= 120,000 low-paying service worker jobs

What about the other 61,000 jobs “created” in July?

6,000 were for credit counselors, 8,000 were wholesale trade, 8,000 were for taxi and bus drivers, etc, etc.

In short, the numbers the Republicans are crowing about show that the American economy failed to create a single high-paying job last month.

How many 2005 college graduates started their careers at WalMart and McDonalds last month? That is a statistic I would like to see…

The unemployment number is the result of guesstimate formulas applied to survey data from a small population of American households. The BLS estimate has a self-admitted margin of error of +/- 500,000 workers. A few tweaks here and there in the data can result in large changes.

Check out the “statistics” the BLS put out during the Democratic convention last year. Surveyed companies showed an increase of 32,000 U.S. jobs for June, but the household survey(the numbers the unemployement rate is calculated from) showed a job growth of 650,000 for June…hehe.

Gotta love those “non-partisan” BLS guys. The poor Demos had to share airtime with the “glowing” economic numbers.

I ask again…anyone know of a recent study on the accuracy of the Bush BLS numbers?