Job Creation: The True Narrative

There’s been a lot of hype about job creation in the news lately.

The Obama administration is basking in the glow of Friday’s report from the U.S. Labor Bureau that unemployment has made the monumental leap from 8.3% down to 8.1% (still a lot higher than the 6% we were told the stimulus would bring).

And the prevailing rhetoric at the recently concluded DNC, other than the insistence that free, Constitutionally-guaranteed contraception is the only issue women care about (and as a strong, independent woman, what else am I to do but run to the federal government when the big, bad Republicans deny it to me?) was the insistence that under a Romney-Ryan administration, all the jobs would be shipped overseas and the middle class would be left to rot in the streets, and under Paul Ryan’s plan, without even Medicare or Social Security to sustain them.

Because as Bill Clinton assured us, Democrats have created twice as many jobs as Republicans since 1961. (And we all know, Bill Clinton would never lie, especially not under oath.)

Unfortunately for the folks at the DNC, Political Math put together the following chart, using statistics from the Bureau of Labor:

Obviously, Bill Clinton paints a wildly different story than the facts do. Yes, Democrats have created slightly more jobs since 1961, but much of that has to do with the state of the economy when they took office.

But, since Obama likes to whine about how much worse the economy was than he could possibly imagine, let’s take a look at his job creation compared to the man he likes to both demonize and emulate- Ronald Reagan. Despite the absolute trainwreck of an economy Reagan inherited from Jimmy Carter, he managed to create 16.7 million jobs in his two terms. In comparison, Obama created 0.1 million as of May 2012. In the first 23 months of the Reagan recovery, an average of 285,800 jobs per month were added to the economy. During the same time period under Obama, an average of 23,000 jobs per month were added.

How did Reagan do it? Tax cuts (yes, even for those evil rich people who ‘don’t need them’) and ‘trickle down fairy dust’. Not the ‘wild eyed socialism’ Obama ascribes to Reagan. Perhaps President Obama should tone down the class rhetoric and fearmongering and take a page from the Reagonomics book.