Brad DeLong, Gutless PunkWell, I had a new experience--a blog comment that I posted that was serious in nature was deleted from Brad DeLong's blog. As you can see on this post at Brad's page, my
comment has been deleted, but its ghost remains in a subsequent comment (Click to Expand):
As you can see, somebody named Anne apparently showed me what goes for, but Brad's also either amended her post, or Howard is a slightly biased debating judge, because here are Anne's two responses:
Through the Clinton Presidency 236,000 jobs a month were created.
Posted by: anne | December 05, 2005 at 05:24 PM
Paul Krugman:
"I could point out that the economic numbers, especially the job numbers, aren't as good as the Bush people imagine. President Bush made an appearance in the Rose Garden to hail the latest jobs report, yet a gain of 215,000 jobs would have been considered nothing special - in fact, a bit subpar - during the Clinton years. And because the average workweek shrank a bit, the total number of hours worked actually fell last month."
Precisely.
Posted by: anne | December 05, 2005 at 05:30 PM
I mean, that's not exactly a brilliant riposte, but given that my original comment is gone, it stands alone in the field of debate on DeLong's blog.
My point was that 215,000 jobs created was a little better than average for the Clinton years. Now maybe Krugman's got different numbers than I have, or he's engaging in some dishonesty. Given his past, either's possible. The BLS shows
tables for civilian employment here. You have to click on the Total Civilian Employment (Seasonally Adjusted) check box, and then send the form. Here's what I got:
From there it's a pretty trivial calculation. Clinton left office in January 2001 with 137.8 million civilian jobs, he entered office in 1993 with 119.1 million civilian jobs, the different is 18.7 million jobs, divided by 96 months (eight years) is about 187,000 jobs per month.
Brad DeLong doesn't want people hearing this on his blog. He's one of those goofy liberals who puts up Krugman posts with no commentary of his own, almost like he's erecting a shrine to his master. He's an economics professor at Cal Berkeley, but he's a gutless punk. And he can't erase the facts on my blog.
