No sooner had word begun clacking over the wires that the American economy had created 248,000 jobs last month than the Democratic front groups started trying to downplay the achievement. One, Americans Coming Together, seems so worked up trying to spin this job creation as bad news that it might as well be named Americans Coming Apart. The Bush jobs machine has churned out a million jobs in the last three months.

The charge that they’re all part-time jobs is wrong. If corporations were willynilly laying off full-time workers and hiring them back as part-timers then American workers would, by definition, be working far fewer hours each week. Friday’s employment report from the Department of Labor shows the opposite. On average, including part- and full-time, workers are putting in 33.8 hours a week. This is actually up slightly from last year’s average. This is also the case in manufacturing, where the average work week is up to 41.1 hours last month from 40.6 for the past year.

Nor does the charge stand up that the new jobs are low-wage, burger-flipping jobs. If all these new jobs pay less than the ones they’ve replaced, then average wages would have to be going down. However, Friday’s release shows year over year increases in average hourly earnings of 2.2% and rising. The latest Personal Income Report and the Productivity and Costs Report concur that wages and salaries are currently rising in aggregate even faster than that.

Another complaint is that a lot of these workers are self-employed and aren’t making any money. That’s partly right. Business start-ups are through the roof. Limited liability companies, the trendiest corporate form for new start-ups, were formed at a record rate in the past year. Another form of business, sole proprietorships, had its income grow 1.3% in April and has shown an incredible 11.7% growth rate in the past year.

Another complaint is that the earnings are all going to higher energy costs, and many in the press have been predicting that higher gasoline prices would force a sharp cut-back in consumer spending. The monthly Chain Store Sales survey, which appeared Thursday, presented the first test of the theory. It failed. Chain store sales soared to 6% higher in May than the year earlier month. Discount club sales were up more than 14%.

Some suggest these are government jobs, financed by sky-high deficits. Leaving aside the false premises that these deficits are unusually high (as a percentage of gross domestic product they’re below other war-time budgets), this assertion is wrong: Government payrolls decreased in May by 27,000 jobs. Finally there’s the suggestion that something’s fishy because while jobs went up the unemployment rate failed to go down. Something indeed is fishy. It is the charge that unemployment is historically low because people are discouraged and have given up looking for work. In boom times people flow into the labor force, not out of it.

Last month workers poured into the labor market at a rate of 233,000; added to March and April, it makes over half a million new job aspirants in the past three months. On net, people are most emphatically not dropping out of the labor force. If these job trends continue, all the political operatives now casting aspersions on the Bush economy will have their own firsthand experience looking for work after the election. Odds are they’ll find good jobs pretty quickly.