Bush country is not a good environment for working families

Bob Herbert: The number of Americans living in poverty has increased by three million in the past two years.

• The median household income has fallen for the past two years.

• The number of dual-income families, particularly those with children under 18, has declined sharply.

The administration can spin its "recovery" any way it wants. But working families can't pay their bills with data about the gross domestic product. They need the income from steady employment. And when it comes to employment, the Bush administration has compiled the worst record since the Great Depression.

Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, has taken a look at the hours being worked by families, rather than individuals. It's a calculation that gets to the heart of a family's standard of living.

The declines he found were "of a magnitude that's historically been commensurate with double-digit unemployment rates," he said. It was not just that there were fewer family members working. The ones who were employed were working fewer hours.

According to government statistics, there are nearly 4.5 million people working part-time because they have been unable to find full-time work. In many cases, as the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas noted in a recent report, the part-time worker is "earning far less money than his or her background and experience warrant — i.e. a computer programmer working at a coffee shop."

Economists expect some modest job creation to occur over the next several months. But there's a "just in time for the election" quality to the current economic surge, and even Republicans are worried that the momentum may not last.