Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s Deputy Campaign Manager, Stephanie Cutter, had some…interesting…things to say recently.
Well, I think that worker probably has a good understanding of what’s happened over the past four years in terms of the president coming in and seeing 800,000 jobs lost on the day that the president was being sworn in, and seeing the president moving pretty quickly to stem the losses, to turn the economy around. And over the past, you know, 27 months we’ve created 4.5 million private-sector jobs. That’s more jobs than in the Bush recovery (or) in the Reagan recovery.
Hmm….
The Investor’s Business Daily editorialist had a few things to say about her claim.
She starts counting private-sector job growth under Obama in February 2010 and, sure enough, in the 29 months since then (not 27 as Cutter says), there have been 4.5 million private-sector jobs created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
February 2010 was fully eight months into the economic recovery. So Cutter has simply picked the worst month under Obama as her starting point…. In the aftermath of the 1981-82 recession, private-sector jobs bottomed out in December 1982, the month after that recession ended. Twenty-nine months later, the private sector under Reagan had created 8 million jobs—nearly twice as many as under Obama. How about Bush? …if you use the Cutter method, the private sector created 4.7 million jobs in the 29 months after July 2003, when the job market bottomed. In other words, Bush beat Obama by his own preferred measuring technique by 200,000 jobs.
What’s more, after 29 months of allegedly stellar job growth under Obama, the jobless rate is still 8.3%. By this point in the Reagan and Bush jobs recoveries, the unemployment rate was 7.2% and 4.9%, respectively.
It’s important to note, too, that Obama continues to offer not least minim of evidence that these created jobs have resulted from his policies in particular, and not from the normal economic business recovery that follows any recession—only now with the recovery rate suppressed by his policies.
And there’s this tidbit that bears on Cutter’s claim.
In January 2009, the month President Obama entered the Oval Office and shortly before he signed his stimulus spending bill, median household income was $54,983. By June 2012, it had tumbled to $50,964, adjusted for inflation. … That’s $4,019 in lost real income, a little less than a month’s income every year.
[E]ven if you start the analysis when the recession ended in June 2009, the numbers are dismal. Three years after the economy hit its trough, median household income is down $2,544, or nearly 5%.
Some jobs he’s “created.”
Now, isn’t Cutter the one who spoke Obama’s lie about his Republican opponent being a felon? Isn’t she the one who carried Obama’s denial of all knowledge of his SuperPAC’s ad accusing his opponent of killing a woman with his practices at Bain? Why, yes. Yes, she is. Can anyone take seriously anything her mouth talks about?
A larger question: can we afford four more years of an administration so plainly out of contact with the reality of our current economic strait?
h/t Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club