While we can't total up the damage from the current recession or even the current financial crisis, since both are still ongoing, with the release of December's unemployment numbers we can at least start to draw a line under the Bush presidency -- to the American economy what Hurricane Katrina was to New Orleans, or Doug Feith's Pentagon was to Iraq.
Since December marked the last full month of Bush's maladministration, we now have a reasonably full record of presidential job creation -- or, in his case -- job decimation -- to examine. (My past practice has been to add the final January of a term to the outgoing president's economic record, but closing the books now can't be called unfair to Shrub, since the economy is likely to cough up as many jobs this month as it did in December, if not more.)
Indeed, Bush and his wrecking crew are lucky to be clearing out of town now. As things stand, he can still point to the net creation of just over 3 million jobs since the Rehnquist Court inflicted him on us eight years ago. But my guess is that close to half of those jobs will also disappear before the recession hits bottom. If the Obama stimulus package turns out to be as sucky as the critics fear, they could all vanish and then some.
Of course, luck probably plays as much of a role as skill when it comes to presidential economic records -- especially in Shrub's case, since he had no detectable skill to begin with. But I was still curious to see how Commander Codpiece's track record stacks up against his predecessors. So I spent an hour or so crunching numbers. The results demonstrate pretty conclusively why the Democrats will be running against George W. Bush from now until sometime in the middle of the 21st century.
There are, of course, several numbers to consider and several plausible ways to slice them. For example, we could look at total job creation, percentage growth in employment, or changes in the unemployment rate -- and compare track records by president, presidential term or period of party control.
For simplicity's sake, I've chosen to compare presidents, and measure performance by percentage growth in employment over each full presidency -- annualized to account for those unlucky First Magistrates (like Jimmy Carter and Shrub's Dad) who only lasted one term. I've gone back as far as 1948, essentially covering every post-World War II president, including the elected portion of Harry Truman's time in office. To account for interrupted terms (due to assassination and resignation, respectively) Kennedy and Johnson are treated as one president, as are Nixon and Ford.
And the results are:
Leaving aside the absolute awfulness of Bush's tenure (and his first term was actually worse than his second, with a net job loss of 0.10%, the first time that's happened since Herbert Hoover) a couple of other things kind of jump out here. One is the surprisingly poor job-creation record of Dwight Eisenhower, which doesn't exactly jibe with the popular memory of the '50s as "Happy Days."
Here again, part of it is just bad luck: Eisenhower took office just as the Korean War jobs boom was peaking, and left office at the end of a recession. Still, it helps explain why Ike's economic policies -- particularly his second-term obsession with balancing the budget -- were considered excessively restrictive, and why JFK was able to win in 1960 on a promise to "get the country moving again."
The second thing that's hard to ignore is the overall partisan cast of the standings -- with each and every Democratic President (including the much-maligned Carter) ranking ahead of every GOP president (including St. Ronnie). Draw your own conclusions.
Bending over backwards to be fair, it should be duly noted that job creation is as much a function of demographics as economic dynamism -- much less presidential economic mojo. Presidents who happen to be in office when the labor force is growing rapidly (like Carter and Reagan both) are likely to have relatively strong job creation histories, but their record at holding down unemployment may not look nearly as good.
That being the case, I also ranked the post-World War II presidents by the annualized change in the unemployment rate during their tenures:
In this case, a negative number, i.e. a decline in the unemployment rate, is good. (The heading on that fourth column should read "% point change," by the way.)
The picture changes, but not by much. Carter looks worse and Reagan a bit better -- making him the only Republican president since the end of World War II to preside over a decline in the unemployment rate. Shrub, meanwhile, is pushed out of the cellar by his own father as well as by Eisenhower and Nixon/Ford -- who both inherited unemployment rates even lower than the one Clinton left behind.
Perhaps that will be of some meager comfort to lil' Bush as he begins the battle -- which no doubt will last the rest of his misbegotten life -- to rescue his presidency from garbage heap of history.
But for the rest of us -- especially the newly unemployed --"still better than Ike" (much less "not as bad as Nixon") aren't slogans that are likely to inspire many charitable feelings as we watch the cowboy who couldn't shoot straight ride back to his ranch.
Update 7:40 PM ET: In the comments, gjohnsit notes that Shrub's job creation total has probably been inflated by the BLS's controversial "birth/death" model, which seeks to adjust the survey results to account for the creation of new firms and the failure of existing ones. It's been argued that in periods of recovery, the birth/death model will underestimate job creation (as more new firms get created than the model predicts) and will overestimate job creation in recessions (as more firms fail than the model predicts). The BLS, on the other hand, insists that the error term in the model is generally pretty stable.
We'll know the answer for 2008 pretty soon, because at the end of every year the BLS goes back and adjusts the job count to reflect actual birth/deaths as opposed to the model. These benchmark revisions will be released in early February, along with January job numbers.
Right now, the agency is predicting that the benchmark revision will shave just 21,000 off Shrub's final job total -- not much more than a rounding error, given the massive job losses last year. But, as I said, we'll see.
Also, several commenters complain that the unemployment rates shown above are misleading, since the BLS has been busy whittling down it's definition of "unemployed" since at least the early '60s.
There is, however, a broader alternative measure -- known to the economic cognoscenti as "U-6" -- that seeks to adjust the "normal" unemployment rate to account for discouraged workers, forced part-time workers, and others who've been defined out of the jobless universe over the years. As such, it's much more comparable to the historical unemployment rates cited for the Great Depression. As of December, U-6 was well north of 13%. That's roughly half the peak unemployment rate in 1933, but, like the "normal" unemployment rate, U-6 is also likely to head quite a bit higher before this bitch of a recession is done working us over.
All that said, however, the point of the diary was to compare Shrub's economic record with previous presidents. And since I believe the BLS has back-adjusted the unemployment figures using current definitions, it IS at least an apples-to-apples comparison.
Update 2 11:00 PM ET: I screwed up the annualization on the second chart, which has now been fixed. Not much changes, except Carter looks even better and Bush's Dad worse, even worse than Shrub.