It's Not Just Our Economy, Stupid

This coming week, Mr. Bush will begin a tour in which the message will be not only "more tax cuts", but to make all the previous tax cuts permanent. In preparation for this, he's spoken several times of the great unemployment report in December.

But there are so many problems with this that you really don't need an economist like Paul Krugman or The Economist to begin to spot them.

Every month, the Labor Department has to correct the previous month's "favorable" report. The correction is almost always for the worse. The Bushies certainly aren't the first to fudge these, particularly coming up on an election year. But what's insidious with them is that they don't tolerate bad figures so people who don't quickly find new jobs are removed from the stats faster and faster. Listen to Bush and Company, and these long-term unemployed are all entrepreneurs and new small business owners. I doubt that's the case.

For example, we keep hearing that 900,000 or perhaps even 2 million people are out of work. But how does that jive when we've learned that more than 3 million are out of work JUST in manufacturing? And manufacturing hasn't been the only group to bleed.

Remember how the tax cuts were going to stimulate the economy and create jobs? The government predicted at least 150,000 jobs would be created in December alone. In reality, about 1,000 were. Few of the jobs created in the past six months pay a salary that is commensurate with a family being able to pay its normal living expenses.

Where the economy has been stimulated has been in a few areas of the stock market, and in luxury purchases. Most mortals these days don't dabble in the stock market because they saw the big losses. Most mortals are also not buying yachts and Rolls Royces. But CEOs who saw the most massive tax cuts did NOT use that money to fuel the creation of jobs. They pocketed it. CEO salaries have continued to climb ever upward, despite the scandals and the huge layoffs.

Congress voted itself another large pay hike, while many Americans with jobs are working more hours, expected to produce far more within those set hours, and sometimes taking a pay cut just to keep those jobs. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush makes twice what most of his predecessors made as president, and he's taken more vacation time of any president in US history. Much of the time he is on the clock, he's fund raising. Not for us. For a race in which he initially has no challengers.

But even if you set ALL that aside, including this moronic vision of his in which he'll cut all other spending to NASA except for manned Moon and Mars missions, and see our role in the world. The American dollar is in free fall against the Euro. Part of this is directly answerable to the policies we've enacted in the past three years.

There are global industry partners who say now that America won't be a major market force in a few years and that America is no longer a good investment. Tourism from other countries is apt to drop considerably thanks to our new "security" measures, too.

The International Monetary Fund says American fiscal irresponsibility now endangers the entire world economy.

With all this said, exactly where is the great economic recovery?