A Vibrant and Strong Economy?

So says our Liar-in-Chief:

I want to thank members of my economic team for coming in the Oval Office this morning to bring some good news here for America’s families and America’s working people. The – last month our economy added 110,000 new jobs. And that’s good news for people here in our country. It’s an indicator that this economy is a vibrant and strong economy.

Real GDP growth from 2006QII to 2007QII was less than 1.9 percent. While it is true that we’ve added over one million new jobs over the past nine months per the payroll survey, the growth in employment has not been sufficient to keep the employment to population ratio from declining. As of December 2006, this ratio stood at 63.4 percent. As of last month, it stood at 62.9 percent (*). To claim we have a vibrant and strong economy ignores the economic data that we’ve witnessed this year.

Of course, the claim that the economy is vibrant wasn’t the worst of what President Bush said this morning:

If you want this economy continue to grow, and if you want to reinforce the fact that we’ve got – entrepreneurship is strong and people are working, don’t raise taxes. And I’m looking forward to working with the Congress to set priorities on how we spend the people’s money

Setting priorities as in all that spending making a mess out of Iraq. Of course, we’ll never have to pay more in taxes because of this fiasco as money grows on trees – at least in the mind of the leaders of today’s Republican Party.

* original misplacement of decimal point fixed – thanks to one alert reader.

Update: I see that Karl Rove has his minions spamming our comment box with “blame the elders” and “blame the women” excuses for the fact that the employment to population ratio is currently well below what it was say in December 2000. Karl Rove’s minions must be too lazy, dumb, or dishonest to check over at the BLS website for the details so I just did. The employment to population ratio for the 55 plus crowd was 31.8 percent as of December 2000 and now is 37.6 percent. Maybe there are more elders but these guys aren’t exactly retiring early.

Now as far as the ladies, their employment to population ratio did decline from 57.6 percent as of December 2000 to 56.7 percent last month. The ratio for the fellows declined from 71.7 percent to 69.5 percent. Oh well, Karl really does need to get a smarter class of minions.