DNC Ad Uses Misleading Information on Job Losses, Report States
By Randy Hall
CNSNews.com Editor
August 12, 2004
(CNSNews.com) - An ad from the Democratic National Committee indicates that 2.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since George W. Bush became president. That's true, but the statement ignores the fact that manufacturing jobs started their decline three years before Bush took office, according to a report at factcheck.org.
In the ad, which was released on Aug. 6, the announcer says "millions of good jobs lost to plant closures and outsourcing" as the video shows the words "2.7 million manufacturing jobs lost."
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that payroll jobs in the manufacturing sector went from nearly 17.1 million at the time Bush took office to just over 14.4 million in June, a decline of nearly 2.7 million.
However, U.S. manufacturing employment declined by 544,000 between the peak reached in March of 1998 and when President Bill Clinton left office, even as the economy added nearly 7.8 million jobs in all categories during the end of an economic boom that ended a few weeks after Bush was sworn in.
In fact, 238,000 of those manufacturing jobs were lost during Clinton's last six months in office, showing that the decline was well established even before Bush spent a day in the Oval Office.
Furthermore, by choosing to highlight only manufacturing jobs, the DNC ad ignores offsetting gains in other sectors that have been growing.
A look at the bigger picture -- total payroll jobs -- shows a much less severe decline of just over 1.1 million jobs since Bush took office, the report indicates. The decline in manufacturing payrolls has been mostly offset by gains in such industries as health care, construction and government (such as teachers and firemen).
It now seems unlikely that even total employment will return to the level of January 2001 by the time Bush's full four-year term ends. As Democrats like to point out, that would indeed make him the first president since Herbert Hoover to experience a net job loss over a full term.
However, it is also true that as of June, the economy had regained nearly 1.5 million jobs since the worst point in the job slump in August 2003. Even manufacturing jobs are growing: 91,000 have been added since January.
The ad says Bush "protects tax breaks favoring corporations that move their headquarters overseas." It's true that administration tax-policy experts testified against a Democratic proposal aimed at stopping U.S. companies from moving their headquarters overseas, but that proposal was actually aimed at stopping corporate tax avoidance, not job loss.
The administration favored a different approach, arguing that the Democratic approach would be "unlikely to work and likely to have harmful effects the U.S. economy," according to House testimony in June 2002 by Pamela Olson, who was then the Treasury Department's acting chief of tax policy.
Olson argued that the Democratic approach would discourage businesses already headquartered overseas from doing business in the U.S., hurting rather then helping American employment.