December's numbers are out, and it's clear that whatever impact the tax cuts may have had on GDP and other features of the nation's economic picture, the employment figures reveal that jobs are in the toilet. Not just the pitiful number of jobs created, but the quality of jobs in terms of security and pay and benefits. We're talking about an economy that's adding temp positions and burger-flipping jobs in the stead of solid employment--full-time, responsible, vested and well paid. A large segment of the American workforce has become transient, migrant workers, and the rest of them have no jobs at all.
Yes, the GDP will get another blip-boost when hefty income tax refunds are mailed out to taxpayers, the result of the lower rate that was applied to the last several months of their wages. But that will translate, as did the one-time refunds in May, into retirement of their astounding personal debt or into a brief consumption bounce (of products made in China or Korea however).
And then? A dramatic downward slide of the jobs figures, and personal income figures, through the summer until the November election. And there's nothing Bush can do about it.
I can't wait.
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