The always reliable Wall Street Journal editorial page touts yet another misleading statistic:

Remember the 2004 debate over the “jobless recovery” and “outsourcing”? Here’s the reality: The great American jobs machine has averaged a net increase of nearly 200,000 new jobs a month this year. Some 4.5 million more Americans are working today than in May of 2003, before the Bush investment tax cuts.

But, as I showed earlier, payroll jobs declined dramatically between January 2001 and May 2003:

Using the May 2003 start date vastly exaggerates both job growth since the last recession and the effect of the 2003 tax cuts (what about the ones passed in 2001?).

In fact, considered as a whole, the recovery has been one of the weakest on record, as the New York Times’ Edmund Andrews recently noted:

Consider jobs, the focus of the Treasury chart. A unique aspect is that the job count continued to fall for 18 months after the 2001 recession ended. The number of jobs in November was up 3.4 percent from the job low 30 months earlier.

That measurement, which is the way the Bush administration chose to look at the data, ranks eighth among the 10 postwar recessions, a fraction ahead of the recovery after the 1990-91 recession, and better than the period after the recession that ended in July 1980, when another recession followed a year later.

Were job growth instead to be measured from the end of the recession, this recovery is the slowest ever, with the job count up 2.6 percent in four years. The previous low was a 4 percent gain in the four years after the 1953-54 downturn.

Any analysis of the recovery after the 2001 recession must ask why huge tax cuts that began in 2001 had so little – and so long delayed – effect.