It’s unpopular to assume that improvements in employment statistics might sabotage Democratic plans to make the “jobless recovery” an effective focal point of the campaign to torpedo George W. Bush in 2004.
Nonetheless, the sooner the Democratic candidates accept this fact, the sooner they can devote more attention to turning other aspects of their economic proposals into compelling sound-bitable themes that resonate with the voters.
The
news today hammers the point home:
WASHINGTON — The nation's unemployment rate dropped to 6 percent in October as companies added thousands of new jobs for the third straight month, new evidence of an improving labor market.
The Labor Department reported today that payrolls grew by 126,000 last month, significantly more than the 50,000 new jobs that economists had predicted. That followed a revised 125,000 new jobs in September, which initially was reported at 57,000.
U.S. companies also added new jobs in August, marking three months of hiring gains following a sixth-month slump. …
"We can finally put the nail in the coffin of the jobless recovery," said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. "We are back on a rising job track."
Mayland’s upbeat comments echoed those made Wednesday by Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary John W. Snow
who said :
…"it is clear we have entered a new phase of economic expansion." He cited last week's report that the economy expanded at a 7.2% rate in the third quarter, the strongest growth in almost two decades.
"This is not a fleeting glimmer," Snow told members of the Economic Club of Washington late Wednesday.
Certainly, the Administration is going to run with these statistics for all they are worth, even though they are only a hint, not proof, that the employment situation is getting better.
As economist J. Bradford DeLong points out at
his blog today:
The fact that we are all happy at two months during which payroll employment grows as fast as the labor force--the fact that we regard this as good rather than bad news--shows us how low the employment-news bar has become, because of how bad the employment news has been for such a long time.
And Rep. Pete Stark of California, the ranking Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee in Congress, notes that the
current pace of job growth would need to keep going for 19 more months to return to the peak employment level reached early in 2001.
"This level of job creation, while better than expected, is probably not strong enough to keep up with the growing labor force, let alone erase the enormous jobs deficit any time soon. ... Unfortunately, we are still a long way from a robust jobs recovery."
Absolutely true. To get back to the prosperous days when Bill Clinton turned the keys over to George Bush, the economy needs more than 200,000 new jobs a month.
But, as I noted
here last Friday - amid considerable dissent - perception matters a great deal. Even if only 100,000 new jobs a month are generated in the next 10 months, I wrote, the general
perception will be that the situation is steadily improving and the Republicans will take credit. No chance, I was tsk-tsked. Why would I spread such nonsense? The 57,000 new jobs created in September were just a temporary upward blip in a generally dismal scenario, I was told. Well, that number has been revised sharply upward to 125,000. And we’ve got October’s 126,000 as well, a figure that itself will, of course, be revised, possbily upward.
Many on the left continue to argue that other factors in the economy ensure that this growth is not sustainable. That the good news in employment is a mere blip due to temporary effects when people get their tax-cut checks, to seasonal vagaries or just to dumb luck. And while they may be right. I think they’re whistling in the dark.
To have an impact on Americans’ views about which party can do the best job when it comes to the economy, the Democrats need to focus on the bigger message. It’s not that several candidates don’t already have one – they just need to talk about it more. This doesn’t mean they should avoid the issue of jobs. Far from it. Manufacturing jobs are still being lost – 39 months running so far – and there are structural problems to pay attention to as well.
They might start with a look at a recent report from the Haas School of Business which says
14 million America jobs are at risk of being “outsourced” overseas:
There is growing apprehension among business leaders, economists, and ordinary Americans that we are witnessing what may well be the largest out-migration of nonmanufacturing jobs in the history of the US economy. This concern has been fueled by newspaper reports and economic news highlighting the layoffs of thousands of people in high-tech, software and service sector companies in the US, and the practically simultaneous, seemingly coordinated establishment of offices and development centers, most often in India, resulting in hiring of thousands of new employees in that country. For example, tabulation by the authors of reports in Indian newspapers and business journals for the month of July 2003 alone gave an estimate of 25,000 to 30,000 new outsourcing related jobs announced by US firms. In the same month, there were 2,087 mass layoff actions carried out by US employers resulting in a loss of 226,435 jobs.1 The jobs being created in India and elsewhere are in a wide range of services sectors such as geographic information systems services for insurance companies, stock market research for financial firms, medical transcription services, legal online database research, and data analysis for consulting firms, in addition to customer service call centers, payroll and other back-office related activities.
Then, too, Democrats should remember that reports about enhanced GDP and job growth are only partial measures of economic well-being as the
Weighted Index of Social Progress designed by Richard Estes makes clear.
Take the poll:
