The Jobless Recovery and the Descent of the Washington Post

The right-wing hackery from the Washington Post's editorial page defies belief.

There are the lapses into incoherence: "firms have to create jobs they never had before, which takes longer than recreating old ones... job creation lags in the early stages of a recovery." But we are now 2 1/4 years after the end of the recession. A six month lag I could understand. A twelve-month lag I could admit as a possibility. But 27 months? Nope. Employment is lagging not because businesses are too bureaucratic and slow to hire quickly, but because demand growth has been slower than productivity growth. Policies that had produced faster demand growth--either by not scaring the bejeezus out of everyone by claiming that Saddam Hussein was an immediate and deadly threat to every American, or by a fiscal policy that had more employment bang--would have produced faster employment growth as well.

There are the out-and-out lies: "fewer jobs were destroyed during the downturn." The Payroll Survey--which is our best set of estimates--has as currently at a net of 2.3 million jobs destroyed during our current period of recession-like activities. Compare that to a maximum net decline of 1.3 million jobs over 1990-1992, 2.9 million jobs during the 1981-1982 worst post-WWII recession, and 1 million jobs in 1979-1980. As measured by the decline in payroll employment, this is not a period in which "fewer jobs were destroyed during the downturn."

There are the total adbdications of rationality in the interest of providing a fig-leaf for the Bush administration: the claim that "Mr Bush should not be blamed for" the fact that job creation is lagging, immediately followed by "his irresponsible fiscal policy harms business confidence and therefore job creation."