zoink said:
Here is 10 years worth of data along with a nice graph, and from the BLS. It can go back to 1939.
Sincerely,
zoink
Very nice, thank you. And it beautifully illustrates something I've suspected. Namely, blaming Bush for the job loss in the first two years of his first term is the height of partisan blindness.
Clinton rode the job boom of the 90s on the back of the Internet and dot-com explosions. When they dried up at the turn of the millenium (and they did, big time), that caused a shift in the economy. Now, after several years of Bush's economic policies, bolstered by a Republican Congress and (now) Senate, there have been two complete years of job increases. Are we talking a 20s-style boom? No. But it's not exactly the Great Depression, is it?
Going back to 1939, we see a few patterns emerge. If you look at each president's term of office since that time (start with Truman, since Roosevelt already had six years in office before the stats were compiled), there are certain trends. Give each president two years for his economic policies to take effect (inertia takes time to overcome).
Truman: benefited to a degree from the post-war boom; despite soldiers returning from war, jobs were plentiful. However, after he was actually elected in 1948, America spent the next year in free-fall, losing well over 1,000,000 jobs.
Eisenhower: 1952 was back-and-forth, and 1953 ended on a down note. But by the end of 1954, things changed, and 1955 was a boom year. Things slowed down by the end of his second term, though.
Kennedy: Inherited a drop-off from Eisenhower; things picked up shortly afterwards, and his 1963 tax cut made a huge difference...
Johnson: had only four negative months during his entire time in office.
Nixon: A significant drop in 1970, after two years in office. Thing picked up dramatically after that, and he had only two more negative months for the rest of his truncated term.
Ford: Wasn't there long enough to really note any trends. 1975 sucked, though.
Carter: Interesting...Maligned as an economic disaster, with rampant inflation and double-digit unemployment, he still managed to preside over only one single negative month...up until 1980, when suddenly things started to tank.
Reagan: 1982 was lousy, to say the least...but after his programs got off and running, only August 1983 and June 1986 had negative growth...and August was followed by the single largest increase in the whole chart, over 1,000,000 new jobs in a single month. In fact, including the two negative months, there were only five months from 1983 to mid-1989 with less than 100,000 new jobs. And people still say Reaganomics sucked?
Bush 41: Inherited a great economy from Reagan, then tanked it in the early 1990s despite the Gulf War; July 1990-Jul 1991 saw only one month above zero. Things leveled off then, and going into Clinton's term the job market was actually showing slow but consistent growth.
Clinton: The dot-com boom helped, but other factors certainly had a hand in making the 1990s a banner decade. Was it Clinton? Was it the Republican Congress? Welfare reform? Hard to say; historians in fifty years will have a better answer than I.
Bush: Dot-com boom ended just before he took office. Up until May, 2003, Bush presided over a very nasty slide; 2,657,000 jobs lost. But by the end of his first term, Nov 2004, 2,335,000 of those jobs were back...and another 1,185,000 have been added, for a total net gain of 863,000 jobs. And he's still got over three years left to go. And since May, 2003, there hasn't been a negative month.
So, what can we say about this? Any trends that stick out? Aside from the Reagan-bashers being proved utterly wrong, it seems that most of these presidents had their most noticeable changes two or three years into their first terms.
