Job Losses Started Under Bill Clinton

Much has been made of the job losses that have occurred during the George Bush administration, even though most of that talk ignores the single greatest foreign attack on American soil and its tremendous economic impact. However, frequent CQ contributor Bandit has done a bit more research into recent job-loss history and finds that the rosy picture painted about the Clinton years by the Kerry campaign and his media allies is more cartoon than realism:

First major signs that all was not well surfaced in May 2000. This is the month the biggest recorded decline in jobs in eight years – 116,000 jobs disappeared [see private-sector jobs — CE]. What made this number even more alarming is that the cutbacks were widespread affecting all sectors: 29,000 jobs in construction, 71,000 in wholesale and retail, 17,000 in manufacturing, and 11,000 in transportation. …
The unions were sensing not all was well under Clinton’s booming economy, in August 1999 the AFL-CIO, in a report to the Clinton Administration, said the manufacturing sector “is in crisis, having lost 491,000 jobs since March 1998. Little has been done to assist manufacturing companies in coping.”
A Seattle Times article dated November 07, 1999 was projecting 1 million job cuts in the coming year.
The White House put out a little noticed Press release on March 5, 1999 that read: “Reflecting the weakness in the world economy, manufacturing employment fell 1.8 percent during the past year.”

Bandit asks: Where was John Kerry while these portents of economic crisis appeared? Campaigning for Al Gore on the Clinton economic record while it fell apart, apparently. We know that the Democrats have tried to sell the resultant recession as Bush’s problem, but economists have insisted that the economy fell back into recession as early as before the 2000 election. And while all this went on, John Kerry sat in the US Senate and did nothing — introduced no legislation or took any action at all. He didn’t even go out and open a business to create any jobs, even with the vast wealth at his fingertips.
John Kerry: the do-nothing candidate.