As Obama Crows, Real Story Is 10.5 Mil Jobs Deficit Posted 02/03/2012 07:02 PM ET
Jobs: Of course it's good news that 243,000 new jobs were created in January, shaving the unemployment rate to 8.3%. But thanks to massive policy errors by the White House, we're still way below where we should be.
President Obama, speaking in Arlington, Va., immediately took credit for the bullish report, crowing that "altogether, we've added 3.7 million new jobs over the last 23 months."
The president went on to say: "We can't go back to the policies that led to the recession. And we can't let Washington stand in the way of our recovery."
"Our" recovery? And "We can't go back to the policies that led to the recession"? The cause of the recession was, in fact, housing policies put in place by President Clinton and aggressively supported by Democrats in Congress, including former Sen. Barack Obama.
How soon we forget. These were the policies that led to the housing meltdown, the financial crisis and, ultimately, the deep recession we're still climbing out of.
Yet Obama's "blame Bush" theme will be the Democrats' strategy for the 2012 campaign. So get used to it.
Truth is, by now we should have created millions more jobs than we have. But Obama's $836 billion stimulus, his botched industry bailouts, his failed "green" energy policies, his regulatory siege on business, and his disastrous attacks on Wall Street and entrepreneurs have made this the worst recovery in history.
The recovery began in June 2009, just months after Obama took office and before his stimulus took effect.
According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the economy is just 0.7% above its previous high. Usually at this point in an expansion, it's 13.5% above the last peak. In other words, thanks to Obama's policies, we're missing about $1.8 trillion in GDP — or roughly $5,760 for every man, woman and child.
Far worse for most Americans is the jobs depression that has accompanied Obamanomics. As the chart shows, we've suffered a jobs implosion greater than any since World War II.
Obama likes to blame his predecessor for this. And true enough, 4.4 million jobs disappeared during the 2007-08 panic. But after Obama took office, an additional 4.3 million jobs disappeared. So when Obama says "we've added 3.7 million new jobs," he's not giving you the full story.
We are still 5.6 million jobs below where we were at the peak in 2007. Add to that the 4.9 million new jobs that would have had to be created just to soak up new entrants into the workforce, and all told we have a jobs deficit of 10.5 million.
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