That Bush believes the country needs his thoughts on how to create economic growth is laughable. After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”

The Center for American Progress’s Pat Garofalo caught this little tidbit and nicely summarized why the idea of Bush writing a book on economic growth is ludicrous.

After all, under his watch, “growth in investment, GDP, and employment all posted their worst performance of any post-war expansion,” while “overall monthly job growth was the worst of any cycle since at least February 1945, and household income growth was negative for the first cycle since tracking began in 1967.” As the Economic Policy Institute found, “between the end of the 2001 recession (2001Q4) and the peak of that expansion (2007Q4), the U.S. economy experienced the worst economic expansion of the post-war era.”

And there was the matter of the Great Recession.

Last summer’s walkout by foreign students working for a Hershey chocolate subcontractor under the government’s Summer Work Travel program prompted an investigation by the State Department, which is responsible for overseeing the program. Recently, the State Department issued new rules for the Summer Work Travel program, including capping it at 109,000, down from a 2008 high of 152,000. Assessing the new rules, the Economic Policy Institute’s Daniel Costa and Ross Eisenbrey conclude that the rules are not perfect but are “a significant improvement and go far toward protecting the rights of U.S. and J-1 workers.”

According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, “between 2000 and 2011, the wages of young college graduates [aged 21-24] dropped 5.4 percent (1.6 percent for men and 8.5 percent for women),” after they grew 19 percent between 1995 and 2000. As EPI noted, “young graduates who enter the labor market during periods of strength (e.g. 1995–2000) face much stronger wage prospects than young graduates who enter the labor market during periods of weakness (e.g. 2001 to the present).”

Private industry employers have been slowly adding jobs for 19 months. A net gain of 130,000 jobs was reported last week for the month of April. Meanwhile, though, the public sector lost 15,000 jobs in the month, continuing a nearly four-year-old cutback trend.

Those government job cuts have eliminated many jobs held predominantly by women and African-Americans.

“The disproportionate share of women and African-Americans working in state and local government has translated into higher rates of job loss for both groups in these sectors,” a report by the Economic Policy Institute said.

From 2007 to 2011, state and local governments shed about 765,000 jobs nationally. Women made up 70 percent and African-Americans 20 percent of those job losses, the institute said in a report last week.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, the cuts demanded by the GOP in exchange for raising the debt limit will cost the economy 1.8 million jobs this year. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner already pushed back on Boehner’s remarks, saying, “this commitment to meet the obligations of the nation, this commitment to protect the creditworthiness of the country, is a fundamental commitment that you can never call into question or violate.”

“We’re adding jobs, but just enough to keep up with growth in the normal working-age population, not enough to start really putting the backlog of unemployed workers back to work,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, which focuses its research on low- and middle-income workers.

About half of the nation’s internships are unpaid, said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president for the Economic Policy Institute, aWashington, D.C., think tank. Internships should provide training similar to what students are offered at a school, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

The Labor Department has received few complaints about this, a spokeswoman said.

But Eisenbrey said that’s because most interns are afraid to complain when they’re just starting out. The institute discussed these questionable internships at a recent forum with a Labor Department regulator, who said the agency is too understaffed to adequately monitor this.

Indeed, between 1979 and 2009 worker wages increased by just 10.1 percent compared to an 80 percent increase in worker productivity, according to a 2011 report by the Economic Policy Institute.