President Bush continues to roam the country touting the success of his tax-cut-driven economic policies, but the real world continues to offer a sharp counterpoint. Last week the U.S. Labor Department reported February job statistics that showed a 78 percent drop in job growth as compared with January's disappointing results. Just as importantly, the February numbers revealed, as CNN reported, "the slowest pace of wage growth for workers in 18 years [and] the longest average unemployment duration in 20 years." The jobless, joyless economic recovery that Bush is so proud of is getting less impressive every day.

The 21,000 new jobs reported by the administration for February barely made a dent in the 2.35 million jobs lost over the last three years. Moreover, as The New York Times reported on March 6, the government sector accounted for the entire net gain in employment. "This is a terrible number," Wells Fargo chief economist Sung Won Sohn told CNN. "The economic recovery is almost three years old, and the economy should be producing 200,000 to 300,000 jobs a month.... Unless the labor market gains some steam and momentum, both real income and confidence of consumers would be hurt." Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Chicago's LeSalle Bank/ABN Amro was even more blunt: "Conditions aren't getting any better and may be getting worse."

The anemic job-growth numbers hid even more ominous news. The unemployment rate stayed steady, but, according to The Wall Street Journal: "The labor-force participation rate plunged to a 15-year low of 65.9 percent amid a 'steep' drop-off in the number of men in the work force, the department said. Thousands of workers just gave up looking for a job -- approximately 392,000 people left the civilian work force during the month."

The paltry benefits of the jobless and joyless "recovery" must, of course, be measured against the enormous price the country is paying, and will pay for many years, for the Bush policies that have produced it. These include a systematic abandonment of the Clinton administration economic policies that helped generate the longest period of low-inflation, high-employment, high-living-standards growth in more than a generation; a conversion of the largest federal budget surpluses in history to the largest federal budget deficits in history; a plundering of Social Security funds needed to deal with the impending retirement of the baby boom generation; an assault on the hallowed bipartisan principle of progressive taxation; an abandonment of any real effort to deal with a variety of big national challenges from health care to energy independence to investment in science and technology to raising the knowledge and skills levels of American workers.

The large and growing price of the Bush gamble that cutting tax rates on the wealthy is the philosopher's stone of economic growth is becoming intolerable, and will get far worse in the very near future. That these policies are not even producing a "devil's bargain" of short-term economic growth makes their abandonment an urgent national priority.