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Fun with numbers Around and Around It GoesBy Rick Horowitz
There seems to be some confusion. I am, as you may have heard, a sworn enemy of confusion -- confusion in the country, and confusion in high places. I especially hate confusion when it's about something important. Jobs, for instance -- when people are confused about where their next job is coming from, or even if it's coming at all, that's bad. And that's exactly what's been happening lately: widespread confusion about jobs. That's where I come in. I may not have all the answers. I do, however, have a simple explanation: the Wonderful Wheel of Work. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Have you noticed, over the past few days, the peculiar spectacle of some of the Bush administration's top people walking away from the administration's own job projections? Strange, but true: No sooner had the Economic Report of the President been sent to Congress, predicting that 2.6 million new jobs would be created this year, than the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Treasury both started backing away from that rosy number. Stranger than that: The president then did the very same thing. A reporter at the White House asked him on Wednesday if he agreed with the job projection, and instead of embracing it, Mr. Bush treated it like somebody else's used socks. "I think the economy is growing," he declared, "and I think it's going to get stronger." Sure, but how much stronger? Two-point-six-million jobs stronger? The prez wasn't going there. Now, it's not as if this particular report crash-landed in Washington from another galaxy. Mr. Bush may not have crunched the numbers himself, but the report was, after all, put together by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and it did have the president's signature on it, and it was called the Economic Report of the President -- not, say, the Economic Report for the President, or to the President, or in the vicinity of the President. Howdit happen? How did the administration come up with job numbers that even the administration won't endorse? It has to be the Wonderful Wheel of Work. You probably haven't heard of the Wonderful Wheel of Work. There's a reason for that. (Actually, there are two reasons, but we'll just talk about the first one.) The Wonderful Wheel of Work is a closely guarded White House secret. In fact, you could quiz the entire White House staff, and you wouldn't find a half-dozen people who had ever seen the thing, or even heard of it. But it's one of the great under-appreciated perks of this presidency. Every year, when it comes time for the president to issue his economic forecast, he sneaks off to the sub-basement and gives the wheel a spin. All around the wheel are different figures, each one representing the number of new jobs the economy will be churning out in the next twelve months. Whatever number comes up, that's the number the White House uses -- like last year, for instance, when they said we'd gain 1.7 million jobs, even though we wound up losing over 400,000. (There are, of course, no negative numbers on the wheel; it's the Wonderful Wheel of Work.) So this year, the president was lucky enough to land on 2.6 million, which would be just big enough to make back all the jobs that have disappeared since he took office and still have a few extras, just in case. Actually, it's not entirely luck -- being the president, he's allowed to take do-overs, to keep spinning the Wonderful Wheel of Work until he lands on a number he really likes. Which is the number they finally went with, and put in the report, until somebody must have realized that 2.6 million new jobs was an incredibly high goal with the job market crawling along the way it's been doing recently. Somebody also must have realized that "2.6 million" made a very specific, very juicy election-year target for the Democrats if it turned out to be as far from reality as the previous predictions had been. So they did the only thing they could do: They disowned it. Even a Wonderful Wheel can turn on you. Trust me -- you won't hear this explanation anywhere else. Posted 2/19/04. For
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Rick Horowitz
