Unpublished LTTE and fuel for Wednesday

[ewagner]

I submitted this letter on Saturday morning and it hasn't been published.....oh well,

but...I think there are some points in here that Kerry can use tomorrow night.

The BLS numbers came out today showing job creation in September at an anemic 96,000. The economy isn’t expanding quickly and, if you consider that it is widely accepted that the economy has to produce 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the number of people entering the workforce, it might be said that we’re losing ground.

So just what has the Bush Administration don done to create jobs? At every stump speech the President says that his tax cuts will create new jobs. The first tax cuts came in 2001 when he promised us that they would create 2 Million new jobs. It’s 2004 and we haven’t seen those jobs.

It has been said that to a carpenter, every problem looks like a nail and every solution is a hammer. The neoconservatives in the Bush administration are like that. Every economic problem they see requires the same solution: Tax Cuts. During the 2000 campaign when the economy was still healthy, Bush said (essentially) the economy is good. We need a tax cut. When the recession creped in, his mantra was: The economy is bad, we need a tax cut. Now, the economy is sluggish so his mantra is: We need a tax cut. This is not a sound way to address economic policy. It is myopic and counter productive.

Frequently we hear that the reason the economy is still sluggish is because of September 11, 2001. True enough, the events of that awful day did affect the economy. But it is equally true that even just a few days after the tragic event, the economic impact was clearly visible and predictable. What did the administration do to mitigate it? Nothing.

Bush deserves to be turned out of office for many reasons but failure to address the economic welfare of the country outside of narrow ideological focus is probably the best reason.