Volume 51, Number 16 · October 21, 2004
Bush & Kerry: A Big Divide
By Benjamin M. Friedman
Twenty years and five presidential elections ago, Walter Mondale said that Ronald Reagan's economic policy was turning America into a 'nation of hamburger flippers.' Although the recovery from the steep 1981–1982 recession was well under way by election time, and American businesses were employing four million more people than they had four years earlier, the increase in jobs was entirely in the service sector. All other industries combined—manufacturing, construction, mining—had shed more than 800,000 employees. Moreover, American workers' wages had, on average, failed to keep pace with inflation.
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