Tax Cuts and Job Growth: What Growth?

At the 2008 Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington, President Bush said that the tax cuts for the wealthy he pushed through a conservative Congress “contributed to a record 52 months of job creation. They helped produce strong economic growth — and the increased revenues from that growth have put us on track to a balance our budget by 2012. Here is the bottom line: tax relief works.”

What he did not say is that during that period, job growth, such as it was, has been anemic by historic standards, and has been on a downward path since early 2006, according to the federal government’s own data. In fact, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in January 2008 the number of people with jobs was just 6.2 percent higher than it was in January 2001, while the country’s population growth was 7 percent during that period. Not surprisingly, the number of people unemployed in January 2008, 7.57 million, was 25 percent higher than the number unemployed in 2001.

That statistic doesn’t even speak to the quality of jobs created versus the quality of jobs lost under Bush’s watch, once of the reasons the nation is experiencing record income inequality. The bottom line is that if President Bush is looking at the job market, tax relief has not worked to bring about broad-based prosperity.