Americans really do need more hours of work

The following July 12 editorial from the Orange County Register may or may not reflect the views of the Cheney Free Press editorial board.

Jeb Bush tripped over his tongue this past week when he posited that, to grow the U.S. economy, “people should work longer hours.” The remark by the Republican presidential candidate was misconstrued in some quarters as suggesting that American workers are somehow lazy.

Indeed, that’s how the Democratic National Committee’s rapid response team chose to play it: “So does Jeb’s whole 4 percent econ plan rest on his Americans working ‘longer hours’ solution?” tweeted out Miryam Lipper, the DNC’s deputy national press secretary.

That’s also how Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, one of Mr. Bush’s rivals for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, chose to play it: “It would seem to me,” said Rick Tyler, national spokesman for the Cruz campaign, “that Gov. Bush would want to avoid the kind of comments that led voters to believe that [Mitt] Romney was out of touch with the economic struggles many Americans are facing.”

We think both the DNC and the Cruz campaign are disingenuous. They know Mr. Bush did not intend to denigrate American workers, but to call attention to the millions of Americans who remain unemployed or underemployed six years into the putative Obama recovery.

In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month that 8.3 million Americans are jobless. And a quarter of those are considered “long-term unemployed,” that is, out of work 27 or more weeks.

BLS also reported that 6.5 million Americans are employed part time “for economic reasons.” Such workers would prefer full-time employment, but their hours have been cut back or they simply are unable to find a full-time job.

President Obama didn’t mention those disquieting statistics during his appearance two weeks ago at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse. Instead he celebrated that “our businesses created another 223,000 jobs” in June and that “the unemployment rate is now down to 5.3 percent.”

Those numbers were prima facie evidence, he said, that “[m]iddle class economics works.”

Well, we join Mr. Obama in celebrating last month’s private sector job creation, while also noting that gains reported by BLS for May and April have been revised downward by a total 60,000.

We also welcome the reduction of the nation’s official unemployment rate, while mindful of the fact that it remains higher than it was at the start of the 2007-09 recession and would be higher still were not the nation’s labor-force participation rate — the percentage of working-age Americans either working or looking for work — the lowest it’s been since 1977.

We refuse to accept that the under whelming 2.2 percent annual growth the U.S. economy has managed over the past six years is the new normal. And that “full employment” now amounts to roughly 15 million Americans either unemployed or underemployed.

Bush may have been in artful this week in putting into words the current state of the economy, but his view is not out of step with those of the American people, 54 percent of whom say the economy is getting worse rather than better, according to a recent Gallup Poll.

Americans are desperate for robust economic growth and the abundant jobs and increasing wages that go with it.