by Mike Hall, Nov 3, 2006

Just days before the election that threatens the Bush administration’s majority choke hold on Congress, you can be sure the White House spin machine will be running full-tilt to frame today’s jobless report as proof that Bush’s give-it-all-to-rich-and-Big-Business economic policy trickles down to the rest of us.

But the nation’s economy and how it affects working families goes far beyond the monthly job report. It’s about falling wages. It’s about the growing gap between the rich and everyday families and workers. It’s about the rising cost of health care. You can be sure that neither Bush nor his campaign stand-ins are going to pull back that curtain and show voters the real picture.

The U.S. Department of Labor announced this morning that the unemployment rate dropped slightly—by two-tenths of a point to 4.4 percent in October. The number of new jobs was 56,000 fewer than were created in September and fell 33,000 short of economists’ predictions of 125,000 new jobs.

Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) says private-sector job growth numbers represent the lowest monthly growth in a year and that construction, especially residential housing, retail and manufacturing, saw job losses in October. He also notes that 15,000 of the 92,000 new jobs are temporary jobs.

This week, the EPI also released a Postcards from an Ailing Economy report. Here are some excerpts.

• Since 2000, the median family headed by someone of working age (65 or less) has seen its income drop 5.4 percent after adjusting for inflation. This represents a loss of $3,000 in annual income.
• As usual, most of the growth in wealth is to the wealthiest. In 1962, the wealth among the richest 1 percent of the population was 125 times that of the median household. Today, that ratio has risen to 190.
• Adjusted for inflation, the median earnings of full-time workers have fallen since 2001, even after Bush’s second round of tax cuts in 2003 supposedly jolted the economy.
• Fewer employees receive health insurance through their employers now than in the past, as coverage has declined from 61.5 percent in 1989 to 58.9 percent in 2000 to 55.9 percent in 2004. Less well-known is the fact that those who still receive employer-provided coverage are now paying a larger share of those.

Don’t be surprised if Bush and his cronies on the campaign stump also tout the recent rise in the stock market as another golden economic indicator. Such crowing just shows how far out of touch they are with real working families. As EPI notes:

But how important is the index to the average person? Fewer than half of Americans own any stock at all, and the richest 20 percent of the population owns 90 percent of all stock market wealth.

Both Bernstein and AFL-CIO Chief Economist Ron Blackwell say there are signs the nation’s economy is slowing again. Blackwell says economic recovery from the recession in Bush’s first term is “tepid” at best and that job growth has been the weakest of any recovery since World War II. Says Blackwell:

American workers were told that the labor market always lags economic growth in a recovery and that if they are patient and stand in line, their turn to enjoy the benefits of the recovery are bound to come. The sad reality is that the recovery appears to be stalling, before working families are able to recover their losses in the last recession. America is on the wrong course—economically and in other ways—and American workers will register their desire for economic policies that generate a more broadly-based prosperity next Tuesday at the polls. 

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