Yesterday, Alziard discussed a recent article in Business Week titled  What's Really Propping Up the Economy.  Here is the money quote from the article:

But the very real problems with the health-care system mask a simple fact: Without it the nation's labor market would be in a deep coma. Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been added in the health-care sector, which includes related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Meanwhile, the number of private-sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago.

This article highlights the fact that Bush's job growth is the worst of the last 40 years.  Below are some charts that show just how bad job growth has been.

First, let's look at what Bush promised versus what we got.

Now - that's a big difference.  Bush's projections were -- shall we say -- optimistic.  As the New York Times noted in the article An Odd Recovery: Unemployment is Low and So is Employment:

But so far, as the charts show, there are just 3.5 percent more jobs than at the end of the last recession. That is less than half the lowest of the nine previous moves -- a gain of 7.6 percent in the period after the 1953-54 recession. And that figure was held down by the fact that another recession, in 1957-58, had taken place by then.

Back to the Business Week article:

Sure, housing has been a bonanza for homebuilders, real estate agents, and mortgage brokers. Together they have added more than 900,000 jobs since 2001. But the pressures of globalization and new technology have wreaked havoc on the rest of the labor market: Factories are still closing, retailers are shrinking, and the finance and insurance sector, outside of real estate lending and health insurers, has generated few additional jobs.

Perhaps most surprising, information technology, the great electronic promise of the 1990s, has turned into one of the biggest job-growth disappointments of all time. Despite the splashy success of companies such as Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ), businesses at the core of the information economy -- software, semiconductors, telecom, and the whole gamut of Web companies -- have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years. Those businesses employ fewer Americans today than they did in 1998, when the Internet frenzy kicked into high gear.

Let's look under the macro numbers to see what we have.  First, the last recession ended in November 2001 when there were 130,883,000 million jobs in the US.  However, it wasn't until April 2004 when the total number of jobs in the economy surpassed the number at the beginning of the recession.  In total, the economy has created 4,617,000 jobs since November 2001 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Here's the overall graph of job growth from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Again referring to the New York Times article cited above, this is the worst record of job creation in the last 40 years.  The central problem is while there have been some areas of growth, there have also been some areas of extreme contraction.  For example, the US has lost over 1.6 million manufacturing jobs since the end of the last recession and 2.7 million since the beginning of the last recession in March 2001:

In addition, the economy has lost 473,000 information service jobs since November 2001 and 659,000 since March 2001:

As the Business Week Article notes, the economy has added a ton of educational/health service jobs.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy has added 1,933,000 education and health care jobs since November 2001.

In addition, the economy has added a large number - 1,087,000 -- of leisure and hospitality jobs:

So, since the beginning of this expansion in November 2001 the economy has lost over 2 million jobs in high paying fields - information and manufacturing.  At the same time it has added almost 2 million health care and education jobs and 1 million leisure and hospitality jobs.  And the economy has only created 4,617,000 jobs since the beginning of the current expansion, making the areas of lower paying job growth a clear majority of all jobs created.

This is not a really good trade-off.