BillHobbs.com is a frequently updated blog of original reporting and commentary by Bill Hobbs, a longtime Nashville journalist and media relations adviser. I am currently serving as communications director for the Tennessee Republican Party, a job I began on Oct. 29, 2007.
President Bush has long cast his economic policies as being good for small business, good for the entrepreneur. Now, even the New York Times has admitted there is data to support the claim, in Floyd Norris' very good article exploring the difference between the government's two surveys on employment and job growth and explains why the payroll survey has not produced data showing the same high level of job growth as the household survey. The story also contains this nugget:
The household survey includes the self-employed as well as agricultural workers, who would not be counted in the establishment survey, and the establishment survey counts each job so that a worker with two jobs could be counted twice.
But over time the two surveys have been roughly similar, although with an interesting political difference. Republican administrations tend to produce better household numbers than establishment ones - perhaps reflecting a better environment for the self-employed. Democratic administrations tend to show better establishment figures.
Huh. And I thought the central complaint of the Left against the GOP was that the GOP favored Big Business. The truth is, the economic policy of lower taxes benefits entrepreneurs whose small businesses may one day become large businesses.
The household survey showed a gain of 629,000 jobs in July. It's not a mirage - entrepreneurs, not Big Business, are powering this economic recovery. I blame the Bush tax cuts.
1) Look at the last paragraph: "On average, the establishment survey has shown a 10.1 percent rise under Democrats and a 4 percent gain under Republicans. The household survey has shown a less marked preference for Democrats, whose edge is 6.7 percent to 4.8 percent."
In other words, job creation in BOTH surveys is BETTER under democrat adminstrations. Norris' point in his article is that the gap is far wider with respect to the establishment survey than it is with respect to the household survey.
To be fair here, these are surveys, which means that they each have a margin of error. Norris doesn't say what the margin of error is, but since there is only a 1.9% difference in the household survey, there is probably no statistical difference between household job growth and democrat job growth.
2) You also didn't highlight this bit: "Going back to Harry Truman, Mr. Bush - by either measure - has presided over an economy that has produced the poorest job creation record of any occupant of the White House to this point in a presidential term."
3) Personally I struggle with the way the performance of the economy is tied to any single administration - especially a single term admnistration. The American economy is huge and complex, and I don't see how any single lever (like tax cuts) can affect it that much, or even how you could measure the effect of a single action in any meaningful way. Which means that while it is fine to say you "blame the tax cuts," I doubt anyone could prove or disprove that.
3) Finally, with respect to the data Norris cites: all that this data shows is a correlation, not causation. You don't know which way causation goes. Maybe people tend of vote democrat when the economy is strong, and tend to vote republican when the economy is doing badly. In other words, maybe the economy drives which party wins the elections, rather than the administrations driving how the economy goes. Then again, maybe not!
Bill your link supplied in the update now points to a story about mean old Republicans taking money away from women who are trying to run their own businesses. That can't be relevant to your article, right?
Odd. That link formerly went to a story on the bizjournals.com site, but the story at that link changed. The other story seems to have vanished, so I have changed the link to go directly to the survey itself, instead of to the now-vanished news story about the survey.
fascinating. I remember reading in this selfsame spot, barely three months ago that the payroll survey without question, was the more accurate measure. A guy named JadeGold was upbraided for even suggesting looking at the household numbers.
Of course, this was a month when the payroll number was 308,000 vs a measly 32,000 which may explain why the payroll numbers are now suddenly, like irrelevant
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