Economy Going into Recession While U.S. Spends Billions Helping Iraqis

With the unemployment rate edging up and housing starts going sharply down, it is dawning on the geniuses in the Bush Administration that the economy is heading into a recession. This is bad news for Republicans. One of the things that Republicans wanted to argue in the 2008 campaign is that Bubble-Boy's tax cuts helped the American economy. If unemployment starts going up, that argument goes out the window.

As an article in the Washington Post points out, though, the upturn in unemployment is not being spread evenly throughout the economy. The following is from the Post article:

While economic fallout from the housing sector has spread, there are significant parts of the economy that are adding jobs, which has created a bifurcated labor market. The professional and business services sector added 43,000 jobs and health care added 27,900.

"If you're an IT person in Washington, D.C., or an engineer in San Francisco, you have your choice of jobs," said Tig Gilliam, chief executive of the staffing firm Adecco Group North America. "If you do construction, you're doing to have a hard time finding a job you want."

The data released yesterday underscore that assertion. In the past year, the unemployment rate for professional occupations barely edged up, to 1.9 percent from 1.8 percent. In the construction sector, the jobless rate rose to 9.6 percent from 7 percent.

Now, of course, BB's reaction to all this is to call for more tax cuts, most likely directed at his rich friends with a few bucks thrown in for working class Americans. This was the way he got his tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, you know, the ones that plunged the United States deeper in debt. Hopefully the Democratic Congress will resist that idea and, if tax cuts are indeed called for to stimulate the economy, will aim them at working class Americans.

While they are at it, they should start reminding Americans long and loud that the almost half a trillion dollars that BB and The Duck Hunter, (aka the Vice-President), spent in Iraq would have gone a long way to stimulate the construction industry. Think of the new schools that could have been built, new highways constructed, new mass transit systems produced, new high-speed wireless systems created. It boogles the mind. Instead we spent a lot of taxpayer money and priceless American lives trying to help Iraq. The Republican motto: Billions for Iraqis, nothing for working class Americans!