The unemployment rate since 1970 has averaged 6.3 percent; the current rate is 5.6 percent. It would normally be considered insane to equate today's below-average unemployment rate with the Great Depression. But this is not a normal year. It's an election year. In election years, insanity becomes perfectly acceptable. "Fahrenheit 9/11," for example.
The 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign book (which I renamed "Putting Lawyers First") said the first President Bush had "compiled the worst economic record in 50 years ... since the Great Depression." Clinton and Gore apparently thought Herbert Hoover was president in 1942. In a June interview in Money, Kerry again said, "This president has the worst job performance record in 50 years." Kerry apparently thinks Hoover was president in 1954.
In the same interview, Kerry said, "Jobs are a four-year measurement." That may sound fair, but it isn't. What happens to employment over a four-year term depends on where you start. Many presidents took office shortly after a recession had run its course -- notably, Presidents Kennedy, Carter and Clinton -- so employment was then close to a cyclical low point. President Bush took office two months before the all-time record high of 132.5 million payroll jobs. Since it took 120 months to climb to that peak, how can we reasonably expect to have regained the peak after only 39 months?
Alan Blinder, a former Clinton economic adviser, says, "You can legitimately attack the four-year record, charging that Bush compounded bad luck with bad policies." Bad luck, yes. Blinder surely did not intend to suggest lowering tax rates caused higher unemployment, since such a suggestion would instantly subject him to professional ridicule. So, what were the "bad policies"?
I am not happy with the Bush administration's spending and tariffs, yet Kerry promises to do much more of the same. I also believe the recovery was set back by the president's support of the Sarbanes-Oxley law of 2002, which added substantially to the cost and risk of doing business. Indeed, Blinder wrote an op-ed at the time (July 21, 2002) noting: "The reaction to President Bush's recent speeches was instructive. If Wall Street were truly opposed to government help, one might have thought that market participants would have breathed a sigh of relief: The president spoke loudly but carried a small stick. Instead, stock prices tanked."
Of course stocks tanked. Higher costs of regulation and litigation were bad for profits, and therefore bad news for stockholders and employment. But Kerry and Edwards supported Sarbanes-Oxley.
The only other policy of Bush 43 that might plausibly be blamed for hurting employment is Iraq -- specifically, the paralyzing uncertainty before and during the invasion in March 20, 2003. Payroll employment was flat between August and November of 2002, and then suddenly fell by 374,000 through March 2003. Blinder or Kerry might argue the Iraq invasion was bad for jobs, but not for long. Besides, as Sen. Joe Lieberman remarked last October, "I don't know how John Kerry and John Edwards can say they supported the war but then opposed the funding for the troops."
Kerry has another statistical problem. He promises to add 10 million jobs in the next four years. But the labor force is projected to grow by 1 percent a year (and only 0.6 percent after 2009), which adds up to only 6 million added workers. If employment rose by 10 million while the labor force rose 6 million, the unemployment rate in January 2009 would be 2.8 percent. That is quite unlikely, to put it kindly.
There are only two explanations for all the bogus job statistics coming out of the Kerry campaign. Either Kerry and Edwards are genuinely ignorant about the state of the economy, or they believe American voters are, as fantasy filmmaker Michael Moore put it, "the dumbest people on earth." The Kerry campaign either lacks economic competence or lacks integrity.