A week ago we learned that new unemployment claims had been dropping for five weeks straight. We also learned that the unemployment rate for October had dropped from 6.1 percent to 6.0 percent. Furthermore we learned that the job-creation rate for the prior two months had been better than we expected, and had been revised upward. In other words, we learned that the Bush Boom is not a “jobless recovery,” and that you are either an economic moron or a blind partisan if you continue to refer to the Bush economic legacy as “the worst economy since Herbert Hoover.”
BuzzCharts believes in putting things in historical perspective. When the latest unemployment numbers are compared with those of the presidents who followed Herbert Hoover, we find that Bush is not the worst in the jobs department. In fact, he ranks among the best. At 6.00 percent, the current Bush unemployment rate ranks better than the rates achieved during Clinton’s first term (6.03%), Clinton’s first three years (6.23%), George H.W. Bush’s tenure (6.28%), Reagan’s second term (6.48%), Carter’s tenure (6.56%), the Ford/Nixon period (6.64%), and finally Reagan’s first term (8.58%). FDR’s unemployment rate hovered in the high teens until the initiation of World War II.
BuzzCharts would also like to make sure that no angry left-leaning bloggers waste valuable key-stroke time accusing us of cherry-picking a particularly low unemployment month for the Bush administration. So we calculated the average unemployment for Bush’s first three years, and found that it compares even more favorably with previous presidential terms at 5.45 percent.
However you slice the data, the Bush presidency is a low unemployment presidency. No amount of repetition of mindless slogans will change that fact.
— Jerry Bowyer is a radio and television talk-show host and the author of the recently released book, The Bush Boom. He can be reached through www.BowyerMedia.com.