Bush's Economic Lies

"'Our economy since last summer has been growing at the fastest rate in 20 years' said President Bush in a speech last week...

Is it true? Well if you pick the right three quarters -- the first quarter of this year and the second half of last year, to be exact -- it is technically true... But why take 9 months? If we look at the last year, it's not any record at all. Similarly for the last two years.

Bush also bragged about the 1.5 million jobs created since last August. This impressive-sounding number also depends on a careful selection of time period. If we look at Mr. Bush's whole presidential term, the economy is still down more than a million jobs. Even the 1.5 million jobs created during Mr. Bush's selected ten months are a weak performance, barely enough to keep pace with the growth of the labor force.

The economy from here on will have to do better than even Mr. Bush's "brag period," just for him to avoid the record achievement of being the first president since the Great Depression to preside over a net loss of jobs for the country.

Perhaps the worst part of the "job-loss" recovery for most people has been that real wages -- adjusted for inflation -- have actually fallen over the last year. This means that most Americans are literally not getting anything out of our "record" growth.

The Bush administration does have some real 20-year record-breaking numbers but they are not the kind that it would like to advertise. Here's the gold medal: our Federal budget deficit of $639 billion for 2004 is 5.6 percent of GDP, the highest since 1983, and second highest since World War II. Of course this figure from the Congressional Budget Office counts the borrowing from the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds -- which any good accountant would tell you should be counted, because it will have to be paid back. "

Full story at Common Dreams: George W. Bush's Record-Breaking Economy.