Jobs Grow, Inflation Declines

Recent economic news has been positive in every way, including reductions in the budget deficit, GDP growth, and the dollar.

Thus more good news is no surprise, first regarding employment, as reported National Review Online:

John Kerry was saying that George W. Bush would be the first president since Herbert Hoover to have a net loss of jobs during his term. But with the economic data all in for 2004, the summer slump and the Hoover claim can be thrown out with the election-year trash.

For the July-through-September period last year, the economy grew at a rapid 4 percent rate. As for employment, it turns out to be empirically and irrefutably false that the president lost jobs during his first four years in office, as Hoover did, and empirically and irrefutably true that Bush’s election-year jobs-growth rate was one of the highest on record.


Growth in Jobs Under Bush (click to enlarge)

In 2004, the American economy produced 2.2 million jobs, which is the highest rate of job creation since the top of the bubble in 1999. BuzzCharts believes this is a far-better jobs performance than the one Clinton can claim for the end of his second term. Why? The Bush jobs growth occurred without the characteristics of a jobs bubble. In 1999 and 2000, jobs growth corresponded with slowing — and even shrinking — corporate profits. For the most part those new jobs were being compensated out of investment capital, that was being spent down, as opposed to new profits.

And Bush's economic recovery hasn't prompted dangerous inflation, according to the Labor Department:

U.S. prices for raw materials and other producers' inputs fell 0.7 percent in December, undercut by a sharp decline in energy prices, the Labor Department reported Friday. This marked the largest monthly decline in wholesale prices since April 2003.

Excluding food and energy costs, the core producer price index rose 0.1 percent last month. . .

"This is just the kind of PPI that can send traders off early on Friday for a jolly weekend," said Robert Brusca, chief economist at FAO Economics.

"Not only is it in great shape, but it is suggestive of a tempered CPI as well," he said.

Perhaps former Senator (and former VP candidate) John Edwards was correct that there are two Americas. Not rich vs. poor but the lively vs. the liars.

(via Blogs for Bush)