“Mayor Bloomberg created 62,000 new jobs,” claims a direct-mail piece from the mayor’s re-election campaign that landed in our mailbox over the weekend. We’re pleased to see the city gaining jobs, and we don’t doubt that Mr. Bloomberg’s success at keeping crime down and showing some discipline in negotiations with the municipal unions has had at least something to do with it. But a spokesman for the mayor clarified that the claim of 62,000 jobs refers to the period from July 2003 to May 2005, and over any period it’s a stretch to see 62,000 jobs as much to boast about in a city of 8 million residents.

Voters who look beyond the five boroughs will notice that adding more than 60,000 jobs is standard fare in many cities these days, even the smaller ones. Consider Seattle, population 570,000 within the city limits. Hit hard both by the end of the tech boom and cutbacks at Boeing after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the city has gained about 61,000 jobs since 2003. Phoenix, population 1.4 million, gained 76,000 jobs between 2002 and 2004. Seattle’s achievement is even more impressive since it has regained almost two-thirds of the jobs it lost in the recession – its 61,000 job growth compares favorably to the 38,000 jobs it still needs to create in order to return to where it was before.

In contrast, between early September 2001 and 2004, New York City lost 170,000 jobs, as Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute recently noted in these pages, meaning that New York still has a lot of work to do to get back to where it started. Although Mr. Bloomberg tries to spin his jobs number as evidence that the city’s economy is growing overall on his watch, New York still lags the competition. In the 2004 edition of its annual report of “best performing cities,” the Milken Institute ranked New York ninth among the 10 largest cities in America in terms of economic performance, noting that the city’s employment numbers were still 4% below their peak in 2000.

In California, Governor Schwarzenegger offered some words of wisdom in January that Mr. Bloomberg, his direct-mail team, or at least the city’s voters might want to consider carefully: “If a politician tries to take credit for job growth, don’t believe it. Ladies and gentlemen, I did not create this record number of jobs. Businesses created them.” Businesses create jobs best when they’re in cities and states that keep costs low through lower taxes, lower spending, and less regulation. If the politicians would get out of the way and allow entrepreneurial energy to be unleashed, New Yorkers themselves have the potential to create not a mere 62,000 jobs, but hundreds of thousands.