U.S. HAS BEEN BUSHWHACKED ON JOBS

WHAT ECONOMY IS THE PRESIDENT LIVING IN?

A bunch of academics declared last month that the recession is over.

Have you noticed?

There are some encouraging signs that the economy is turning around. Retail sales are up, especially auto sales. The number of jobless Americans seems to be stabilizing.

But a full recovery has been as elusive for President Bush as the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Both are nowhere to be found.

More than 9 million people were listed as unemployed last month, the highest in close to a decade. More than 2 million have been looking for work for more than six months.

Low interest rates, which fueled an explosion in new home purchases and provided one of the few bright spots in the economy, are creeping upward. Mortgage loan applications dropped 16 percent last week compared to the week before. The number of applications is now a third of what they were in May and June.

All this has led to shaky consumer confidence levels. Expectations that the economy will turn around in the next six months has fallen. Only 20 percent believe the economy will improve by the new year, according to a national survey of 5,000 American consumers. One in 10 are expecting things to get worse. Thirty percent are calling this a bad economy. Only 16 percent believe it's good.

So what does the President do? He came out yesterday and once again blamed America's money troubles on 9/11.

Oh, he also tossed in the war in Iraq and corporate scandals. Either way, he's "upbeat" about the prospects of a recovery. The president is all but alone in that assessment.

According to a CBS News poll released yesterday, 60 percent rate the economy as bad, "the most negative assessment seen in this poll in 10 years," says CBS.

Bush keeps talking about the recession he inherited from the Clinton administration. He's called on Congress to restrain itself on spending, basically blaming it for the $455 billion budget deficit the government is now confronting. Last time we looked, however, Congress was dominated not by the tax-and-spend liberals, but by the Republicans. And isn't Bush the head of that party?

More than 80 percent, according to the CBS poll, thought the economy was in good shape when Clinton left office.

Clinton's economic team - many of them Nobel Prize winners - on Tuesday angrily ripped into Bush, calling his administration "the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history."

Guess they didn't like seeing all their hard work go to waste.  

Source: This editorial was posted on Philly.news, the on-line version of the Philadelphia Daily News, on Thursday, January 29, 2004.