The New York Times is running a story saying the Bush economy sucks.
Well, it doesn't do it quite that eloquently. What it does say is that Americans are making less money in 2005 than they did in 2000.
The combined income of all Americans in 2005 was slightly larger than it was in 2000, but because more people were dividing up the national income pie, the average remained smaller. Total adjusted gross income in 2005 was $7.43 trillion, up 3.1 percent from 2000 and 5.8 percent from 2004.
I'm always leery when journalists toss around "average" numbers. There's a big difference between "average" and "median" where economics are concerned, and the fact that the NYT is looking at "average" should throw up a big red flag.
Tom Blumer at Newsbusters.org dissects the numbers and discovers that they don't look exactly the way the NYT says they do.
What I found most interesting about the story was the political slant involved. First of all, George W. Bush didn't become president until 2001. His economic policies had nothing to do with whatever was going on in 2000. So, why include 2000 in the data set? It would be more accurate to start in 2001, after the dot.com bubble had burst and that sector of the market was starting to tank.
Second, the story doesn't even mention the single largest blow to our economy since the Great Depression: the terrorist attack of 9/11. Given what that event did to our economy, throwing thousands of people out of work and preventing thousands of others from finding gainful employment for a longer period of time, why wouldn't the NYT mention it?
It seems to me that the point of the NYT story is to cast the Bush economy in the worst light possible. There's no doubt that employment today doesn't look like it did at the height of the dot.com bubble. There are far more $10 per hour jobs than there are $15 or $20. But there are multiple reasons for that, and many don't have anything to do with Bush administration economic policy. Mostly, it has to do with globalization, which has pushed more people into lower-paying service industry jobs. That's a problem that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can fix without even more devastating effects on American labor.
It's not surprising that the NYT would work so diligently to show the Bush administration in a bad light. I just wish they were a bit more honest and inclusive in their data.
|