The Washington Post had an interesting article today on how "Quality of New Jobs Is Focus of Election-Year Debate". In standard fashion, the article quotes statistics from both sides of the dispute and makes no attempt to sort out who has the stronger case.

Let me try and remedy that. The article cites an interesting study by CIBC World Markets that finds:

...U.S. job creation since late 2001 has been concentrated in low-paying industries such as hospitality, education and personal services, while job losses have hit higher-wage sectors such as transportation, manufacturing, utilities and natural resources.....The message is clear: The vast majority of the jobs that evaporated during the job-loss recovery were high-quality jobs.

The Republican reply to this kind of claim is to say that many high-wage industries are now growing and adding workers. That's true, but even if such industries are now adding workers, if they are growing slower than the average industry--which turns out to be the case--their share of overall employment will continue to decline and the employment share of low-wage industries will continue to rise.

Score one for the Democrats.

The article also quotes Stephen Roach, chief economist of Morgan Stanley, on the nature of wage growth in this recovery:

Despite the well-advertised pick-up of job growth, recent trends in real wage income remain very disappointing. This, in my view, underscores one of the most serious shortcomings of this recovery -- an unprecedented shortfall of the most important piece of personal income growth, wages and salaries.

Democrats support that view, pointing out that "[a]fter adjusting for inflation, average weekly earnings fell 0.4 percent last month and 0.5 percent in the 12-month period." In other words, real weekly earnings are declining, not rising.

The Republican counter to this is to say that "[a]verage hourly earnings, adjusted for inflation, have risen 2.4 percent since Bush took office". But most of that gain took place in the period immediately after Bush took office, before the recession really started to bite. In the current period, real hourly earnings, just like real weekly earnings, are headed downwards. According to economist Jared Bernstein at the Economic Policy Institute, real average hourly earnings declined .3 percent last month and are down a full percent in the last six months, which includes, of course, all the months of good job growth touted by the GOP.

Score another for the Democrats. And that's even without mentioning the benefits aspect of job quality trends, as health care costs continue to soar and the availability and stability of coverage continue to decline. Or the inequality of what little wage growth there has been over the last three years. Or rising prices, especially for gas.

The most compelling hypothesis about why voters are not happy with the Bush economy remains the simplest: it's not that good. In fact, it's still pretty bad. Trust the people: they know what they're experiencing.

Just as they did in the 1990's. Bill Clinton's administration presided over the creation of stunning numbers of jobs (2.8 million in 1993, 3.9 million in 1994 and another 2.2 million in 1995) before the labor market truly tightened in early 1996, real wages started surging and Clinton finally reaped the political benefits of economic optimism. Check out these month-by-month numbers (in thousands) for job creation from 1994 alone, more than a year before the public turned optimistic: 270, 192, 468, 357, 339, 310, 359, 303, 354, 206, 425, 270. Wow. And the Bushies think there should be a tidal wave of economic optimism because there's (finally) been three lousy months of good job growth.

That's what they call chutzpah. And, as they used to say in Papa Bush's day, being out of touch. Way out of touch.