Bushenomic boom rings hollow

I'm no economist. In fact in some circles, my mathematical ineptitude is legendary, but these regular pronouncements out of the White House about how good the economy is really bug me.

Fratto cited last Friday's stronger-than-expected jobs report as evidence of the strength of the economy under Bush. The Labor Department reported that 180,000 new jobs were created in March and the unemployment rate fell to 4.4 percent, matching a five-year low.

To begin with I never understand why a couple hundred thousand jobs is such all-fired great news. We have almost 300 million people. Michigan alone could eat up that gain and barely register in their tax revenues. They never tell you what those jobs are either. I mean if the jobs being created are cleaning hotel rooms or slinging burgers at McDonalds, it's hardly anything to crow about.

And as far as the unemployment rate, the metrics never seem to measure people who have been unemployed so long they've dropped off the rolls and are now living under a bridge somewhere. Nor does it address the underemployed who might hold three part-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet and still don't get health insurance coverage out of it. And you know the numbers have got to be dicey when they trot out the Clinton economy.

If you go back to this point in the Clinton expansion," Fratto said, "they would have loved to have seen the numbers that we have right now."

Even if that was true, so what? I don't pretend to understand macro-economics but I can see what's going on in the micro-climate all around me among the working stiffs of America. The White House claims "real wages" are rising. I see people who are out of work or underemployed. Those with secure jobs are seeing their benefits cut and their wages stagnate while costs for basic necessities rise at a breakneck pace. Savings accounts? Who has any money left over to save? Most Americans are up to their eyeballs in debt.

They can cook the books anyway they like but the only boom has been for the "investor class" who are making money on the money they already had. For working class Americans who are living paycheck to paycheck, there just ain't no money in the bank and no rosy press report is going to change that, or their opinion on Bush's mishandling of the economy.