Here's an odd political thought. One of the big reasons George W. Bush is dropping in most polls (losing 52-44 in the current Gallup/CNN) is that we seem to have what they call a "jobless recovery." Jobs are simply not being created to keep up with the expanding demand for them. Here are some rough numbers as I understand them.
The pool of new people seeking employment is said to expand at the rate of about 150,000 per month. Now, there seems to be some disagreement over how much the job market has to expand to accommodate all those new potential workers. There's a thing called a "mobility factor" which means that you need more than 150,000 jobs created to serve 150,000 people. This is because the jobs do not always appear where the workers are. An availability of new minimum wage jobs in Maine doesn't help the people looking for work in California. Some say we need at least 200,000 new jobs a month just to keep pace and of course, we need a lot more than that if we're going to reduce unemployment. Whatever the number, we're falling far short of it.
Every month, the administration predicts more jobs will be created and every month, their projections are spectacularly wrong. In February, for example, they forecast 130,000 and the total growth was only 21,000. What's worse is that all 21,000 were in the public sector, meaning only that the government hired more people. Conservatives are supposed to hate the whole notion of more folks on Uncle Sam's payroll, and the Bush tax cuts were supposed to spur private industry to create more jobs.
Clearly, that's not happening. Today in Dallas, Bush bragged, "We've added more than 350,000 new jobs over the last six months. The tax relief we passed is working." 350,000 in six months is pretty far short of what the country needs just to stay even, and even that number will probably, like most recent reports, be revised downward. The announced January gain of 112,000, for instance, has recently been restated as 97,000. So clearly, the principle that you cut taxes for the wealthy so they'll create more jobs for the rest of us is becoming increasingly hard to argue.
Now, here's where we come to my weird thought of the day…
Let's say you run a big company. Let's say you're part of the top management of Walmart. Well, you have to love the Bush administration. You're pocketing $20 billion per month and even if you pay honestly, you're paying one of the lowest corporate tax rates in American history, to say nothing of all the other perks you derive from a business-friendly government. Walmart has already donated a million bucks to G.O.P. candidates and its top execs are making personal donations, as well. So why not, around October of this year, start hiring like crazy?
Walmart employs 1.2 million Americans. An average employee makes around $1,000 per month. If they suddenly decided to add 100,000 employees in October, kept them through the Christmas rush and fired them all January 1, it would cost around $300 million. (These are obviously very rough numbers. All I'm presenting here is the principle.) Now, they may not need 100,000 more workers now but through Christmas, they'll need some increase, and every company has short-term work that can be done, so it's not like that $300 million wouldn't give them some useful service. They could even cut back on the hours of some current workers, keeping them technically employed but passing some of their work on to others who would now also be counted as employed.
What I'm getting at is that Walmart could easily hype the employment numbers just before the election. It might cost them some bucks but it also might cost them less than John Kerry as president. If Target, Sears, K-Mart and a few dozen others all made a point of putting on extra workers in October, they could enable the Bush administration to say, "The jobs are coming back," and there would be no real way to prove they were only temporary.
This would be more than a matter of keeping Bush in office. A lot of wealthy folks in this country have a lot riding on the proposition that slashing taxes for the rich will ultimately benefit all. The premise has always been arguable and G.W.B. is certainly making it harder to defend. If a backlash against that supposition merely raised the maximum corporate tax rate from 35% to, say, 38%…well, someone else will have to do the math but it seems to me that would cost Walmart a lot more than hiring some extra workers for a few months.