The Jobs Recovery Looks Good, Until a Longer Look Is Taken - New York Times

The Jobs Recovery Looks Good, Until a Longer Look Is Taken - New York Times: "Four years after the recession ended, the unemployment rate is 5 percent, which is lower than at a similar point after all but one previous recession. But the decline has been slower than in most recoveries, and the rate remains well above the 4.2 percent rate in January 2001, when Mr. Bush took office.
Consider jobs, the focus of the Treasury chart. A unique aspect is that the job count continued to fall for 18 months after the 2001 recession ended. The number of jobs in November was up 3.4 percent from the job low 30 months earlier.

That measurement, which is the way the Bush administration chose to look at the data, ranks eighth among the 10 postwar recessions, a fraction ahead of the recovery after the 1990-91 recession, and better than the period after the recession that ended in July 1980, when another recession followed a year later.

Were job growth instead to be measured from the end of the recession, this recovery is the slowest ever, with the job count up 2.6 percent in four years. The previous low was a 4 percent gain in the four years after the 1953-54 downturn.

Any analysis of the recovery after the 2001 recession must ask why huge tax cuts that began in 2001 had so little - and so long delayed - effect. That is not a discussion the Bush administration embarked upon this week."