« Kuwait Bans "Fahrenheit 9/11" | Main | A Wal-Mart Unionizes (in Canada) »

August 02, 2004

The Bush Depression

The only saying goes, it's a recession when your neighbor loses their job; it's a depression when you lose it.

By the most recent analysis, a lot of people were depressed by Bush, losing their jobs at a rate only matched by the early Reagan years. In the first three years of the Bush Presidency, 8.7 percent of all adult jobholders, or 11.4 million men and women age 20 or older, permanently lost their jobs-- nearly equal to the 9% who lost their jobs in the first three years of Reagan.

It's been hard to get a definitive statistic to summarize why the Bush recession-- despite the softer GDP-style measures-- was experienced by the population as so bad. This seems to be it.

And while many of those who lost their jobs evenutally found a new one, the same study found that 56.9 percent of those re-employed were earning less in their new jobs than in the jobs they had lost.

Oh, and one more kicker from the survey. Those getting laid off were not just part of the usual churn of young or poorer folks cycling from job to job. A large number-- in fact, 5.3 million or 6.3% of everyone who had held a job for three years or more, lost their jobs during Bush's tenure-- a precentage actually higher than the rate for long-term employees during Reagan's first three years.

Posted by Nathan at August 2, 2004 07:34 AM