That Whole Net Jobs Thing . . .

Throughout the campaign, Democrats have pummelled the President for not creating a single net job. Let's leave aside the problem with the view that the President (i.e. the government) is charged with the task of creating jobs. Has anyone considered the fact that Bush came into office with a ridiculously low unemployment rate? For years, it was believed full employment would look like a 5% unemployment figure. With the dot com boom, we witnessed unemployment well below 5%. It would have been anomalous in the extreme if Bush had been able to cook up a magical policy to improve on the fantasy land of life in the tech bubble. His tax credits are the only thing that prevented the bottom from falling out in a big way after the twin disasters of a stock market collapse that wiped out trillions of paper wealth and the far more serious terror attacks.

And by the way, why do we only speak of the World Trade Center when we talk about 9-11? I got lost driving around Washington, D.C. shortly after the attacks and looked up to see the ruin of the Pentagon through the glass of my passenger side window. They hit us right in the heart of our national defense.