Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

There were 337,000 new jobs created in October according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They also revised August and September upward, so the total uptick is something on the order of 400,000, with the total number of jobs created since August 2003, when the Bush tax cut was passed, coming in at around 2.3 million. There is very little chance now that Bush will end his first term with a net job loss a la "the worst jobs record since Hoover" mantra of the Dems during the campaign. The facts, of course, always were:

1. Everything is relative. We had a "jobs bubble" in the late 1990s. That "hyper"- employment made it inevitable that the next few years would appear to be bad for jobs, when we've really been doing well in terms of unemployment straight through. Anyone who looks at the longitudinal data available at the Bureau of Labor Statistics can see for themselves that the unemployment figures in 2001-2003 were nowhere near historical figures in previous recessions.

2. The September 11th effect. Again, anyone who looks at the BLS data will see that the bulk of job losses under Bush -- more than a million -- took place in the four months immediately after 9/11.

It's nice that at least 51% of Americans saw through the demogoguery of the MSM to understand that, this time, it wasn't the economy, stupid. On the other hand, if it hadn't turned out that way, the next few years would have been known as the "Kerry Boom."