Obama Job Growth

By now I'm sure you've seen the chart popping all over the internet showing jobs decreasing under Bush and everything turning around bright and sunny under Obama.  If you haven't here it is:

First thing off the bat that caught my eye was how they start the chart at Jan 2008.  This is well after Democrats took control of both the House and Senate and had plenty of time for their policies to begin taking effect.

Then I noticed it stopped at March 2011, why?  The data is available well after that date, why stop showing how well Obama has been doing.  Oh wait, in April 2011 job growth fell another -190 and in June 2011 it feel another -445.

Here is the data in full as provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Annual
2002	-346	737	-261	-51	413	-124	-2	292	597	-294	-487	-95	379
2003	991	65	-48	199	-89	246	-316	75	60	375	440	-13	1985
2004	61	70	-89	227	172	322	382	17	-86	245	499	-106	1714
2005	120	140	269	600	355	105	312	408	-33	147	-49	253	2627
2006	398	307	284	20	328	264	-151	423	190	499	220	436	3218
2007	58	29	263	-734	317	160	-158	-223	562	-298	649	-322	303
2008	124	-240	-49	22	-201	-191	-208	-334	-137	-267	-714	-750	-2945
2009	-1141	-527	-906	-100	-360	-291	-112	-433	-683	-374	206	-639	-5360
2010	532	165	171	470	34	-203	2	199	6	-272	-135	283	1252
2011	110	221	213	-136	180	-423	65	304	353	190	317	176	1570
2012	847												847

(numbers in thousands)

We took a hit after 9-11 and you can see the economy was unstable going into 2002 but Bush with Republican control kept the country headed in the right direction.

It wasn't until well into 2006 after Democrats swept the house and senate that we saw any real down turn.

In 2010 the government dumped a ton of money into the economy with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, otherwise known as the Obama stimulus.  One of the criticisms of the stimulus however is that the money spent will be divided over several years, we're currently in those years.  What happens when the spending stops?

Of the 3,669,000 jobs created since 2010 how many are permanent that can sustain themselves without government having to take wealth from others to create the impression of job growth?

The other factor this chart doesn't account for is underemployment.  This would be someone working at a high paying job who became unemployed settling for half or even less of their current salary just to get back to work.

The other question to ask is at what cost are the jobs we're seeing coming at?  Obama's new budget has nearly 1 trillion in deficit spending, a debt that will be passed on to our children.  And even with this out of control spending we still have over 4.6 million jobs still to be created just to get us back to close to where we were before Democrats took control of the House and Senate.

Comments

[It didn't stop in March 2011]

They update the chart on a monthly basis. Here is one link to the current chart:

http://reasonableconversation.blogspot.com/2012/02/obama-for-america-releases-interactive.html

There has been private sector job growth for 23 consecutive months, since March 2010.

[it didn't stop in March 2011]

And here is a link to official chart from the Obama website:

http://www.barackobama.com/jobsrecord?source=20120204_sc_misc&utm_medium=email&utm_source=obama&utm_campaign=20120204_sc_misc

[Rick Barnes]

The link you just supplied is factually incorrect. As you can see in the data I took directly from the department of labor's website there were two months in 2011 with negative job growth. That link you provide doesn't show any negatives in 2011.

And for the record the chart I supplied came from ads posted on facebook and yahoo.