I REPLY TO WILL THE SHILL

Will's column is here and in response I sent this LTE to my local paper.

Mr. Will asserts that it is hard to fault the Bush economy and uses statistics that on the surface seem favorable but a little more analysis reveals a far different story.

If one counts jobs created in the private sector, Pres. Bush's economy has been miserable, so miserable that even Pres. Carter's economy dwarfs the Bush numbers. In 4 years under Carter, there were more than 8.9 million jobs created. In the 6.5 years under Bush, only 4 million jobs have been created.

Mr. Will goes on to mention a patron saint of tax cuts, former Pres. Reagan, and credits him with starting a mostly sustained economic growth over the last 102 quarters. Using the same metric as I did above, it is clear where the growth came and it wasn't from the GOP. If one lumps Reagan, Bush I and Bush II together, as of this writing there were 19.9 million private sector jobs created in the 18.5 years when they were in office. In the 8 years that Clinton was President, almost 21 million new jobs were created.

The math is elementary, the choice is obvious.