BUSH, KERRY Views on economy offer a contrast

The Valley unemployment rate decline is deceptive, an economist said.
By DAVID SKOLNICK
VINDICATOR POLITICS WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Top officials with President Bush's re-election campaign say nine consecutive months of job growth nationwide prove that the nation is no longer in a recession.
The main reason for the country's prosperity, they say, is Bush's leadership and his tax cuts.
"All John Kerry has to offer is pessimism, and that places him out of touch with America," said Ken Mehlman, Bush-Cheney '04 campaign manager, during a teleconference call Friday with reporters. "Kerry's negative rhetoric is at odds with an America that is growing its economy stronger and stronger."
Matthew Dowd, Bush-Cheney's chief strategist, said there is a stark contrast between Bush, whom he called an optimist, and Kerry, whom he called a pessimist.
Employers added 248,000 jobs nationwide in May and have increased the number of workers in the country by 947,000 during the past three months, according to statistics released Friday by the U.S. Labor Department.
The unemployment rate, though, remained at 5.6 percent. That is because tens of thousands of jobless are renewing their search for work in an improving labor market, according to the Associated Press.
Campaign officials for Kerry, the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, say even with the recent economic growth, 1.9 million private-sector workers lost their jobs during Bush's administration.
"Kerry is the optimist, and he knows we can do better," said Jennifer Palmieri, a Kerry spokeswoman. "The folks in the Bush administration might be satisfied with the way the economy is going, but Sen. Kerry disagrees. He believes we can still do better."
Ohio, a key battleground state in the November election, continues to lag behind the rest of the country in recovering from the recession. While the national unemployment rate is 5.6 percent for May, the Ohio unemployment rate for April was 5.8 percent. The state unemployment rate for May should be available in about a week.
"There are places in this country that aren't doing as well," Dowd said in response to a question about why Ohio is slower to recover from the recession than the rest of the nation.
Also, the Mahoning Valley's unemployment rate is 7.1 percent, considerably worse than Ohio's. Still, the Valley saw the largest unemployment rate decline of any metropolitan area in the nation from April 2003, 10.2 percent, to this April, 7.1 percent, according to Bloomberg.com.
Analyst's explanation
Don Curry, labor market analyst for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services in Youngstown, says the numbers are extremely deceptive. That's because when the unemployment rate was taken in April 2003, the Lordstown General Motors plant was shut down for a week, leaving about 7,000 people temporarily unemployed.
The unemployment rate in the Valley in March 2003 was 8.1 percent, Curry said. So it is more accurate to say unemployment in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties declined by 1 percent in the past year, and not more than 3 percent, he said.
The Valley is seeing economic improvements, but is recovering slower than the rest of the country, Curry said.
In a separate teleconference Friday, U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland of Lisbon, D-6th, blasted the Bush administration for instructing agencies to expect major spending cuts in 2006 if the president is re-elected.
The information is included in a secret memo recently obtained by The Washington Post. In particular, Strickland is upset that the Bush administration plans to reduce funding to Department of Veterans Affairs in 2006 to levels below the 2004 amount for the agency.
The newspaper wrote that a White House official said the memo is supposed to assist officials in establishing budget amounts and shouldn't be considered a final policy decision.
skolnick@vindy.com