Brad DeLong has an excellent post (with some fairly good follow-up commentary) about the weak labor market and its relation to the administration's severely misguided fiscal policies. I couldn't say it any more clearly than Brad, "...the effect of the 2003 (and 2001) Bush tax cuts was to enlarge the budget deficit in a relatively un-job creating way. It is as if they were designed to reduce national savings as much as possible in the long run while providing little short-run boost to demand."
As an added bonus, Brad works in some well-deserved criticism of the blinders worn by far too many "experts" in the mainstream press who checked their brains at the door when Bush was nominated (in this case Robert Samuelson).
I have a couple quick observations to add to Brad's thoughts: It's not like this should be a complete surprise. A wide range of sensible and respected economists predicted, back in the early days of the 2000 presidential campaign, that Bush's proposed tax cuts would have just this effect. At the time, before the recession and sharp drop in the job market, the arguments centered primarily about the wisdom of what to do with the surplus, and the relative fairness of giving so large a proportion of the cuts to the wealthy --- leave it to the Democrats, they seldom miss a chance to substitute brain-dead populism for clear policy --- but now that we're in an extended jobless recovery (Brad estimates we're 4 million jobs behind where we could be with sensible fiscal policies) why isn't the press (and the public at large) all over these guys for it?
The standard "talking point" given by the administration is that "but for the president's policies, the job market would be even worse" which is (a) completely hypothetical and (b) even if you accept it means we are arguing over whether Bush is the absolute worse or just the second worst president for job creation in the last 100 years. Don't we expect better?
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