Washington ? With more than 9 million Americans unemployed, President Bush and his Democratic opposition Saturday used the Labor Day weekend to showcase the good, the bad and the ugly of a stubbornly sluggish economy.

In his weekly radio address, Bush insisted that his $13 billion in tax cuts are now beginning to bear fruit, citing a recent spurt in consumer spending that he said will fund job-creating business investment.

“This tax relief,” Bush said, “means that America’s workers can save, invest and make purchases they have been putting off. Many moms and dads are using their extra income to take care of back-to-school expenses.

“As consumer spending rises, manufacturers are seeing more new orders for their goods,” the president added. “Now we must build on this progress and make sure that the economy creates enough new jobs for American workers.”

Disappearing jobs

But the Democrats, who are targeting jobs as a key election issue, responded by focusing on the moms and dads who are among the ranks of the newly unemployed.

They said 3.2 million private-sector jobs had disappeared since Bush took office, and called it the worst job-loss record since Herbert Hoover’s during the Depression. They also asserted that the tax cuts continue to benefit only the wealthy.

“In fact, President Bush is the first president in seven decades to have actually lost jobs during his presidency,” declared Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio in the Democratic Party’s radio address.

“And what is President Bush’s response to this unprecedented job loss?” Brown added. “More tax cuts for the most privileged people in our society. Under the Bush plan, the average millionaire gets a tax cut of $93,500. Most taxpayers get less than $100 in tax relief.”

Bush, who will visit Ohio, Missouri and Indiana this week to pitch his “agenda for job creation across America,” had a predictably different spin on the tax-cut numbers.

“For a family of four with a household income of $40,000,” he asserted, “tax relief passed over the last 2 1/2 years means they get to keep nearly $2,000 more of their own money.”

Both right?

There was evidence last week to support both positions.

The president’s rosy take on the economy was bolstered by a Commerce Department report that showed the American economy growing more quickly than many economists had predicted.

A Labor Department report, though, appeared to reinforce the Democratic Party’s job-loss contention, showing that the recovery not only is failing to create new jobs but that old ones continue to vanish. The department reported that first-time unemployment-benefit claims went up by 3,000 during the week ending Aug. 23, for a seasonally adjusted total of 394,000.

Legal reforms

Bush’s aides have conceded that the president is far from satisfied with the pace of the recovery. And Bush, who flew back to Washington on Saturday from a monthlong vacation at his Texas ranch, also used his radio address to urge Congress, returning from its summer recess this week, to take additional measures that he said would further fuel the economy.

Specifically, Bush urged “legal reforms” to eliminate “junk lawsuits,” which he said would improve businesses’ bottom lines, and he said Congress “must restrain government spending so that we can bring the deficit down by half within the next five years.”

Growing deficit

In his response, Brown placed the blame for that ballooning deficit squarely on the shoulders of the president and his tax cuts.

“President Bush turned the $5.6 trillion surplus he inherited from his Democratic predecessor into an estimated debt of $3.3 trillion — a terrible burden that we will now pass on to our children,” Brown said, apparently citing some independent future projections based on a current deficit of about $400 billion a year.

“Rather than tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and huge budget deficits for our grandchildren, and nagging unemployment and economic stagnation, Democrats continue to fight hard for fiscal discipline and an economic plan that would put Americans back to work.”

What Brown did not say, though, is that each of the nine declared Democratic candidates has a different, and often conflicting, plan to accomplish that.