Employment rate soars in U.S. as a result of Bush tax cuts
DALLAS—One positive thing I’ll say about the old roue and likable rogue, Bill Clinton, is whenever he appears on a TV talk show, he never condemns President George W. Bush on the issues of the war on terrorism or social security reform.
Yup, the 42nd president can be honest when he really tries.
No matter how much prodding the likes of Liberals such as Larry King give Clinton, he won’t be led into the trap of utter partisan hypocrisy.
On terrorism, Clinton knows that, from 1993 on, with the first Islamic bombing of the World Trade Center right to the assault on the USS Cole in 2000 and a dozen incidents in between, he himself didn’t pay much attention to the unfolding scenario.
If he had, 9/11 might have been prevented.
As for social security reform, Clinton also knows full well if he hadn’t backed away from his own reform plans due to an outcry of public opinion, the issue wouldn’t have landed in Bush’s lap ready to explode. And a delay of almost a decade has just made reform all the more arduous.
Now, it’s fabled that Clinton vaulted into the White House in 1992 over President George H.W. Bush with the taunt: “It’s the economy, stupid!”
In reality, Clinton and the Democrats won in 1992 because, as I keep repeating over and over, right-wing scatterbrain Ross Perot stole 19% of the conservative vote away from the Republicans. The overall Conservative vote remained solid, but splintered, so Clinton won, again as I keep repeating over and over again, with only 43% of the vote.
Take Perot out of the picture and the man with the loose zipper would have remained in Arkansas smooching—or worse—with the likes of Paula Jones and Gennifer Flowers.
Now, despite Bush’s sagging popularity due to Iraq, polls show the Democrats haven’t directly benefitted.
Happily, their support is stagnant.
Why?
To paraphrase Clinton in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid!
For, as the revered Wall Street Journal has been noting, over the past 12 months, some two-million new jobs have been created in the U.S.
Spin the bottle—appropriately a champagne bottle—and pick any month in the past 12 to see what has been happening to the U.S. economy.
So let’s do that and come up with July. In that month alone, the labour department reported Americans jumped into some 200,000 new jobs.
The 5% unemployment rate in the U.S. today is, again as the Wall Street Journal noted, almost a full point below what it was in the same stage of the business cycle during the much-championed “Clinton expansion.”
Across the past 24 months, some 3.5-million Americans have found work, and every single job lost due to the dot.com crash of 2000-01 has been recovered.
Some critics charge the 5% jobless rate is fraudulently low because many long-term unemployed have stopped looking for work.
Fine, but the labour department reports the percentage of so-called long-term unemployed is fully 2% lower than in the Clinton expansion period.
Coincidentally, the surge in new jobs began at the very point Bush’s 2003 tax cuts became law. Yup, those very same tax cuts Democrats said were only for the rich. One guesses the men and women packing their lunch pails and stamping their time cards are the “rich” people the Democrats were scorning.
All this has been occurring while the hapless John Kerry keeps blasting away at unseen enemies—all Kerry’s enemies are unseen—with his “jobless recovery” taunts.
Meanwhile, on CNN (Mockingly called the Clinton News Network by GOP adherents) self-proclaimed economics whiz Lou Dobbs was scaring viewers with his “outsourcing” series purportedly demonstrating the entire U.S. economy was collapsing as jobs were moving en masse to Asia.
Bush may or may not have made a mistake going into Iraq to topple a loathsome dictator—only history will decide that—but when it comes to pocketbook issues, the Republicans have them down pat.
Troubling thoughts about Iraq aside, Americans are happy and prospering under the Bush administration and unless the economy falls apart, which is unlikely, or the Democrats get rid of their lunatic radical left, again unlikely, the prospects for an eighth GOP win in 2008 look pretty solid.
And I’ll be cheering them right along.
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