Snap Fact #300 - President Obama's Job Creation Record is Outstanding by Any Measurement - Except in the Republican Propaganda World!

If You Don't Believe it, Here Are the Facts!

The economy was collapsing at its fastest rate since the Great Depression when Obama took office. In his second month he got Congress to pass a jobs stimulus bill worth about $900 billion. This helped stop the collapse and heightened the first spike in job growth. But the Republicans blocked more stimuli and by August 2010, falling stimulus spending began reducing job growth.

Here is a graphic illustration of what has happened in job creation under George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In a standard stump speech, to a crowd in northern Colorado on May 10th 2012, Mitt Romney stated this outright lie: "They haven't been able to create jobs. In fact, all of the decline in the rate of unemployment from 10 percent at its peak to 8.1 percent now is due not to job creation. It's been due to people falling out of the workforce, dropping out of the workforce."Here are the facts: Between October 2009 and the present, the unemployment rate had fallen from 10 percent to 8.1 percent. In October 2009, there were 129.5 million Americans with full-time jobs. Today, there are 133 million Americans with full-time jobs. That's a growth of 3.5 million jobs. So yes, Mitt, they have been able to create jobs. And the workforce didn't decline during that period of time, either: It grew by 544,000.

Here's what Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan has been saying in his stump speeches: “Without a doubt President Obama inherited a difficult situation. Here’s the problem. He made it worse.”

Ryan’s statement consists of two parts; the first is gross understatement, the second gross misstatement. It is the misstatement that is the essence of the case Republicans are putting before American voters: That President Obama has made the economy worse. Getting voters to believe that assertion is probably the Republicans’ only hope of winning the election.

So the argument that President Obama has made the economy worse is not only central to the Republicans’ case, it’s pretty much all they have. But the facts do not support this spurious claim.

The following graph of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, traces the annual rate of job creation under Democratic and Republican administrations from Harry Truman to Barack Obama — with 2009 separated out as a year in which any fair-minded person would agree that the “difficult situation” Obama inherited was the main driving force. It dramatically illustrates just how wrong Ryan’s assertion is.

In the eighteen months from the beginning of 2008 through the middle of 2009, a period fully shaped by the Bush economic program to which Republicans now want to return, (but before the Obama stimulus had a chance to take effect), approximately 7.5 million jobs were lost. Over the most recent 18 months of the Obama administration, approximately 2.8 million jobs have been added.

That means that the average monthly job loss during the “difficult situation” before Obama’s policies took effect was 417,000. Over the last year-and-a-half, the average monthly job gain has been 155,000. That’s a turnaround of well over a half million jobs per month. Viewed this way, when the question is asked, “are we better off today than 4 years ago” the answer is a resounding yes! 4 years ago everything was going down and we were on the brink of disaster. Today, largely because of Republican intransigency, we still have a long way to go to return to a really healthy economy, but Obama has stopped the bleeding and we are demonstrable on the way up, not down.

If Rep. Ryan and Gov. Romney see that as making a bad situation worse, it should tell us something about their “vision.”

NOTE: President Obama proposed a major jobs measure that would have created nearly two million jobs in an election year. Debate was blocked by Republican filibuster. The jobs bill was broken down into small parts, some consisting only of tax cuts. Only one part, to help veterans find jobs, was passed (a tiny fraction of the overall jobs legislation but enough to make a significant difference to veterans job rate which is significantly lower than the general numbers). In total, Republicans blocked entirely (not even allowing debate on the floor, which would put them on record) 17 jobs measures.