|  Facts
on Employment
By Joseph
A. Morris, Chairman United Republican Fund of Illinois
John Kerry
wants Americans to think that the economy is tanking and that working
Americans are suffering terrible pains of unemployment. Facts, however,
are stubborn things. The numbers tell a very different tale.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor has
just issued the employment data for June 2004.
Here are the highlights:
1. Inflation remains low -- the Reagan legacy lives.
The Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased a mere 0.3% in June. The
Producer Price Index (PPI) actually went down: - 0.3% in June.
2. The national unemployment rate is 5.6%. (Remember
when Jimmy Carter was trying to persuade us that double digit "misery
indices" were structural and inevitable?) The Illinois unemployment
rate is only slightly higher, at 5.9%.
3. At this point in Bill Clinton's Presidency --
in the run-up to his reelection -- Democrats were crowing about the
good times reflected in the unemployment rate for May 1996: The very
same 5.6%! (The next month in 1996, buoyed by temporary employment
connected with the Atlanta Olympics, the rate went down to 5.3%. In
July 1996 it went back up to 5.5%.) The high-water-mark of unemployment
during George W. Bush's Presidency, 6.1% a year ago in June 2003,
is still lower than the 6.6% unemployment rate of January 1994, the
first anniversary of Bill Clinton's inauguration.
4. Illinois's unemployment rate, low as it is, is
still high for the Midwest. Our neighbors are doing much better: Indiana
at 4.8%; Iowa at 4.3%; Missouri at 5.2% (with a whopping 27,500 new
jobs, second only to North Carolina's 35,400, last month); and Wisconsin
at 5.0%. The difference? Here's one possible explanation: They're
governed by Republicans and, as in Indiana, conspicuously market-friendly,
low-tax Democrats, and not by Rod Blagojevich.
5. 112,000 new jobs were created in America in June.
9,300 of them were in Illinois.
6. More than 420,000 new jobs have been created in
America in the last three months.
7. More than 1.5 million new jobs have been created
in the United States in the last 11 months (since August 2003).
8. Productivity is up 3.8% in the last quarter. Americans
are working more -- and working more efficiently.
All this is occuring against the devastating background of September
11th and two economically draining, if tragically necessary, wars.
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