Bush=McCain=Norquist=No Jobs

The Bush administration claimed their tax cuts would create jobs. We're still waiting.

The number of newly laid off people signing up for jobless benefits last week climbed to its highest point in more than six years as companies cut back given the faltering economy.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that new applications filed for unemployment insurance rose by a seasonally adjusted 7,000 to 455,000 for the week ending Aug. 2. The increase left claims at their highest level since late March 2002.

The job picture hasn't been peachy keen since Bush took office. According to the EPI, the employment situation in 2000s business cycle was considerably weaker than that of the 1990s.

Specifically:

It took longer to regain pre-recession employment levels: Nearly four years passed before the number of jobs in the economy returned to the level reached prior to the recession of 2001. By comparison, after the recession of the early 1990s, it took just over two-and-a-half years to regain peak level employment.

Employment growth remained sluggish: Over the entire business cycle of the 2000s, job growth averaged only 0.6% per year—well below what was needed to keep up with labor force growth. By comparison, over the business cycle of the 1990s, annual job growth averaged 1.8%.

The employment-to-population ratio deteriorated: For the first business cycle on record, the employment-to-population ratio declined over the 2000s, dropping by 1.5 percentage points.2 Over the 1990s the employment-to-population ratio increased by 1.7 percentage points.

Those are pretty dismal figures, yet McCain is promising more of the same according to the Center for American Progress, who quote an old friend of his.

[John McCain] campaigned on being very good on taxes in this election cycle... that he will continue to make [the Bush tax cuts] permanent, that he will veto any tax increase, period, that he wants to cut the corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, that he wants to have full expensing, that he wants to abolish the AMT .... In addition to being the Americans for Tax Reform’s entire agenda, that is a very pro-growth set of policies he has put forward, and he articulates why they are important. — Grover Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform, February 27, 2008

Pro-growth for the rich and famous, yes, but it leaves the rest of us behind.

(Cross-posted at Blogging for MI.)