Black Economists: 'Can't Let the President Off the Hook'

By Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Washington Correspondent


WASHINGTON (NNPA) - President George Bush, who since Sept. 11 has become a wartime president with an 85 percent approval rating, is getting a free ride on the economics issue, according to Black economists.

But, as the war winds down and the smoke clears, criticism from Black people will increase, they predict.

"The president wants to make out like he was working the economy quite well, thank you, if it weren't for Sept. 11. But the reality is that we would have been in trouble without Sept. 11," says William Spriggs, director of the National Urban League Institute for Opportunity and Equality. Sept. 11 clearly exacerbated the slowdown for the nation as a whole and for Black Americans. But I think that we need to keep a perspective that the economy was slow before then. "This is why I'm saying we can't let the president off the hook."

The U. S. Congress failed to pass an economic stimulus package by Christmas break - even after Bush visited Capitol Hill to influence pending legislation. The visit attracted media attention, but lawmakers disagree on the fine points of the Bush plan, which Democrats say benefits corporate America more than real people who need extended unemployment benefits.

Bush appears to be using the war against terrorism to define his presidency, says Ransford W. Palmer, chairman of the Department of Economics at Howard University. "Once the war winds down, people will turn their attention to other issues. Blacks and other minorities will begin criticizing again," Palmer predicts. "There will be a growing amount of criticism as the war winds down."

Of the more than 415,000 Americans who lost their jobs after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, most are non-management employees in the entertainment, service, hotel and travel industries heavily populated by Blacks and other people of color.
But, before Sept. 11 the Black unemployment rate was at 8.7 percent. That's a full percentage point higher than it was the prior year. It is now at 9.6 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"It is very rare for the unemployment rate to jump by one full percentage point and come up. That's happened only like eight times in the last 30 years. So, these numbers were devastating, but it isn't all Sept. 11," Spriggs says.

Philip N. Jefferson, associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College, agrees. 

 "The impact of Sept. 11 caused a slowdown in consumption and that was a further drag on the economy. But that was where Sept. 11 accelerated a decline that was already taking place," he says.

For example, well before Sept. 11 Bush was floating the idea of cutting the capital gains tax, Jefferson says. "So, if the argument is that we [now] need these policies as a result of the events of Sept. 11, then that is not a genuine opinion in my estimation because you were trying to float those policies before Sept. 11 in a different guise with a different motivation." 

Bush, in a radio address early this month, said the thriving economy that started 10 years ago began to slow last year.  He said he was warned when he took office that a recession was beginning.  So, he said he took quick action with a tax cut and disciplined federal spending.
"And by the end of the summer, we could see signs that the economy was responding. But the terrorist attacks of September the 11th hit our economy hard," he said. 
The National Bureau of Economic Research reported that the recession actually began in March, two months after Bush took office. 

"The President and the Congress must act now, Spriggs says. "And they must act decisively to prevent the further escalation of the African-American unemployment rate and the unemployment rate of the nation as a whole, particularly among those workers whose earnings potential and purchasing power have been hardest hit by the economic slump."
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