More of those results which, as the President has been saying on the campaign trail, "matter": Layoffs occurred at the second-fastest rate on record during the first three years of the Bush administration, a government report has found. In the government's latest survey of how frequently workers are permanently dismissed from their jobs, the layoff rate reached 8.7 percent of all adult jobholders, or 11.4 million men and women age 20 or older. That is nearly equal to the 9 percent rate for the 1981-1983 period, which included the steepest contraction in the American economy since the Great Depression. . . The new survey published Friday by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics added to the statistical evidence that layoffs are more frequent now, in both good times and bad, than they were in similar cycles a decade ago.