Dammit Jim, I'm a president, not an economist

This is a hoot. Both George Bush and Treasury Secretary Tony Snow have run away from the Bush administration's own predictions for job growth in the coming year.

Last week, the White House Council of Economic Advisers - you remember, the outfit that arbitrarily change the start date of a recession to benefit Bush, headed by N. Gregory "Outsourcing is just another way of doing trade" Mankiw - issued it's annual Economic Report of the President. It contained the prediction that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs in 2004, a figure not only wildly out of line with other estimates but even more wildly out of line with recent experience.

[W]hile economic growth has been very strong for the last six months, the pace of job creation has been much slower than in previous economic recoveries. After losing about 2.8 million jobs since late 2001, the nation started to add jobs only last fall and has been adding them at the rate of about 100,000 a month,

the February 18 New York Times notes.

The real figure is closer to 90,000 a month (a total of 366,000 since August) - while economists mostly agree that 125,000-150,000 new jobs are needed each month just to keep pace with population growth. Which means that adding 90,000 a month means things are still getting worse on the job front, just more slowly. To add 2.6 million jobs would require more than doubling that rate to 230,000 jobs created per month.

And actually, a lot more than that. The figure of 2.6 million more jobs is actually based on a prediction of an average monthly payroll of about 132.7 million as compared to an average of about 130.1 million in 2003. But - stay with me, now - jobs were lost in 2003, so the average monthly figure was higher than the actual figure for the last months of the year. So to achieve an average increase of 2.6 million jobs for 2004 over 2003, the actual number of jobs created must be more than 2.6 million. In fact, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, the economy would have to add 460,000 jobs per month for the last 11 months of 2004 to meet the administration's predictions.

No wonder Bush hid under the hedge and the Treasury Secretary tried a snow job.

Perhaps the funniest moment, however, was when Scott McClellan, Ari Fleischer's evil stepson,

said the economic forecast was simply the work of "number crunchers." He said Bush - who bills himself as the first president with a Master of Business Administration degree - was not a statistician or predictor.

Neither, apparently, are his economic advisors. Hallucinators is more like it.