On October 21, The New York Times reported that Treasury Secretary John Snow projected that the economy will generate two million additional jobs, about 200,000 per month, before next year’s election. This new number is a huge retreat from the administration’s previous projection made when it was selling its tax cuts. In February the Council of Economic Advisers projected 344,000 per month job growth starting in mid-2003 if the tax cuts were passed and roughly 250,000 jobs created per month without the tax cuts.
Monthly job creation of 200,000 and maintaining unemployment at its current level is far from a satisfactory economic performance. It takes 170,000 new jobs each month just to provide jobs for an expanding population and workforce and 300,000 new jobs each month to lower the unemployment rate by one percentage point over the course of a year.
And, of course, the 200,000 figure from Snow is being offered by a typical cheerleader for the administration thus it is hardly an ingenuous number. |
