Robert Reich on Pacifica Radio
I was listening to Ian Masters on KPFK yesterday as he interviewed Robert B. Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administtration and now professor at Brandeis University. It was remarkable. As a side note, I really enjoy listening to Pacifica Radio, because there’s none of the pretending that goes on with Dan Rather, his confreres, or NPR for that matter.
Reich said that, if Kerry were to lose the election, it would be due to the “Orwellian” lies of “right wing talk radio.” As evidence of this, he said that Kerry should be up by double digits (Howard Fineman said something quite similar on Chris Matthews’ Sunday show as well) because of the dreadful state of the economy. Reich said that we have “the Worst economy in 70 years in terms of job growth.”
Well, of course this is sheer nonsense. The unemployment rate 70 years ago (1934) was about 25%. Today it is 5.4%, a level considered to be pretty near full employment.
Let’s compare Clinton’s 1996 re-election numbers with George Bush’s. Unemployment 5.4% versus 5.4%, and Bush’s employment numbers for minotiries are better. So that’s a draw, with a slight advantage to Bush. Average layoffs in 1996 343,000 or .25% of workforce, versus Bush 348,000 or .23% of workforce — again basically a push, with a slight advantage to Bush. How about real GDP growth over the last six quarters: Clinton 2.95% versus Bush 4.23% — big advantage to Bush. But the realtive merits of Clinton and Bush are just a conceit: the point is that the economy was just fine in 1996, and it’s just fine today — Reich is talking nonsense to play a Jedi mind trick on the weak-minded listeners to KPFK.
But it is worth pausing a moment to consider the differences in the labor force now, and at the time of the Depression. Unfortunately, I can only go back to 1940 in this post, since that’s where my Bureau of Labor Statistics pdf starts. Of the labor force of 55.6 million in 1940, 14.6% were unemployed. There were 47.5 million people working in the US in 1940. Today’s labor force totals 147.5 million and we have 139.5 million people working in the US in 2004. First, notice the scale: total US employment is three times what it was just beofre the beginning of World War II. We’ve tripled just since World War II — unbelievable.
Next, here is a statistic that you are going to have to sit down for if you have been believing the palaver from the Kerry campaign. You see from the preceding paragraph that employment today encompasses 139.5 million people. You’ve heard about all these “job losses” under Bush, right? So employment was higher before Bush, right? No, wrong. Employment at the end of 2000, a month before George Bush took office, was 136.9 million — so total employment today is 2.6 million higher since George Bush took office. Heard that on the MSM? I thought not.
The explanation is simple. There were some job losses in the brief recession we had in 2001, but for most of the last four years the economy has been growing, the labor force has been growing and jobs have been growing. For a brief period the labor force was growing faster than the jobs were growing, but no longer.
So, back to Reich. You will recall in 1984, words in Newspeak often meant the opposite of their actual meanings. Hence it is no wonder that the word “Orwellian” popped into Reich’s mind. Perhaps when he said the “Worst economy in the last 70 years in terms of job growth,” his real, Orwellian meaning, was the Best.