There are now 50 pages touting the mythical “Bush Boom” on National Review’s website. Meanwhile, as Jonathan Chait points out, the net effect of President Bush’s economic policies on net jobs is a staggering negative 800,000 once you subtract those created as a result of government spending:

[T]he question becomes whether Bush’s tax cuts have really created new jobs.

The White House and its allies like to focus on the approximately 4 million jobs that have appeared since the 2003 tax cut. If the year 2003 sounds suspicious, it ought to. Bush first promised that his 2001 tax cuts would create jobs, and then he promised the same thing with a new round in 2002. Instead, the job market kept shrinking. Bush cut taxes again in 2003, and this time jobs came back.

Of course, the job market was bound to bounce back sometime, so if you keep cutting taxes every year, you can just point to your last one and say it did the trick. (Or else all those previous tax cuts failed utterly, in which case we ought to repeal them.)

So anyway, the true measure is that the economy has created about 2 million new jobs since the first Bush tax cuts in 2001. It’s not that impressive of a number. Through the first six years of the Clinton administration, nearly 18 million new jobs were created. Do I think all those jobs happened because of Clinton’s policies? Not even close. But if you’re going to credit Bush’s tax cuts with every new job that’s appeared, Clinton’s policies (including tax hikes) deserve the same credit.

What makes the 2 million new jobs even less impressive is that, as Lee Price of the Economic Policy Institute notes, over that time span 2.8 million new jobs have been created as a result of government spending. A majority of those jobs are in defense — mainly military contractors. Others have come through the spending boom in other areas since Bush took office.

Needless to say, it’s not the magical incentive effects of tax cuts that created those jobs. It’s old-fashioned big government. If you subtract the government-created jobs from the total, you’re left with … a negative 800,000 new jobs, give or take.

How exactly are tax cuts generating so many jobs that they increase revenue again?