He's ignored it for a week

Matthew Hoy
By Matthew Hoy on April 8, 2004

The inestimable Viking Pundit has an idea of what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman will write about in tomorrow's column. I'm going to have to concur with his assessment.

*UPDATE* In a wily attempt to prove us wrong, Krugman has addressed the uptick in new jobs. Krugman's analysis: Not good enough.

Frankly, Krugman's "analysis" is laughable -- for the simple reason that he goes to absurd lengths (lies) to make his case.

America hasn't had an Argentine-level slump, but we have a lot to recover from. After three years of lousy job performance, we should be seeing very big employment gains - and even after last month's report, we're not. It would take about four years of reports as good as the one for March 2004 before jobs would be as easy to find as they were in January 2001.[emphasis added]

If you will recall the Democrat primary campaign, the constant refrain was that the economy had lost 3 million jobs under Bush's watch. In March, 308,000 new jobs were created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Let's do Krugman's math: 308,000 x 48 months = 14,784,000. According to the BLS, there are only 8.4 million unemployed. Even if Krugman is right about the large numbers of people who have given up looking for work, this is more than universal employment -- a surplus of more than 6.3 million jobs -- and no one to work them.

At the end of 2000, the BLS reported 5,692,000 unemployed. Will it really take four years of gains of 308,000 jobs per month to get the job market back to where it was in Jan. 2001? Hardly.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for a correction.

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