Blogger Brad DeLong is in a semantic frame of mind. Specifically, he wants to teach reporters a lesson in economic semantics. In one of two posts, DeLong lectures the press that the much-ballyhooed tax cuts of the Bush administration are nothing more than tax shifts, and should be identified as such.
His second beef involves an article today by Wall Street Journal reporter Jacob M. Schlesinger. (Subscription required.) Schlesinger writes:
With the economy now growing at a rapid clip, and employers finally hiring again in industrial Midwest battleground states, Democrats are losing a pillar of their 2004 campaign argument: that a weak recovery is making it unusually hard for Americans to find work.
As a result, Democrats are edging away from their charges that President Bush is presiding over a “jobless recovery,” which has been a staple of their campaign rhetoric. That argument is giving way to the line of attack that working America is suffering a “middle-class squeeze.”
DeLong complains that “The very sharp and usually incisive” Schlesinger fails to distinguish between “levels and rates of change.”
Warns DeLong: “[D]on’t confuse rates of change with levels: there are still perhaps 4 million people either unemployed or out of the labor force who would have jobs if we had a labor market in equilibrium. (And there are 6 million who would have jobs if we were in a boom like the late 1990s.) It’s still unusually hard for Americans to find work — just not as unusually hard as it was six months ago.”
Ruy Teixeira at Donkey Rising also criticizes the imprecision of a jobs story that appeared in Tuesday’s Washington Post.
“In standard fashion,” writes Teixeira, “the article quotes statistics from both sides of the dispute and makes no attempt to sort out who has the stronger case [the Republicans or Democrats].”
While the Bush administration touts job growth and an improving economy — a message the press has repeated — the real story, says Teixeira, doesn’t lie in the numbers. He concludes: “The most compelling hypothesis about why voters are not happy with the Bush economy remains the simplest: it’s not that good. In fact, it’s still pretty bad. Trust the people: they know what they’re experiencing.”
–Susan Q. Stranahan
Susan Q. Stranahan wrote for CJR.