The real Obama jobs index is worse than you thought
posted at 10:01 am on January 11, 2014 by Jazz Shaw
Ed gave us the rather sobering numbers yesterday from the December jobs report. Those were some pretty brutal numbers no matter how you look at them, and they reinforce the fact that you have to look at a lot more than just the published federal unemployment rate to get the full picture. With that in mind, Andrew Malcom (the Prince of Twitter) and the rest of the editorial staff at Investors Business Daily have compiled a full set of employment statistics for the Obama administration, including historical comparisons to previous administrations, recessions and recoveries. If you thought things were bad, you’re right. But you might not have realized just how bad they are. Here’s just a sample.
6.3 million: Net new jobs created since Obama’s recovery started in June 2009
13.8 million: New jobs that would have been created had Obama’s kept pace with the average of the previous 10 recoveries.3.6%: Growth in private jobs since Obama took office.
43%: Growth in the number of temp jobs.91.8 million: Number of people not in the labor force as of December.
525,000: Increase since November.
11.2 million: Increase since Obama took office.6.7%: Jobless rate 54 months into Obama’s recovery.
5.1%: Unemployment rate 54 months into George W. Bush’s “jobless” recovery.13.1%: Jobless rate in Dec. using a broader measure — U6 — which includes people marginally attached to labor force or working part time for economic reasons.
9.2%: Average U6 rate in Bush’s eight years in office.
There’s plenty more, so you should steel yourself, have a seat and read the entire thing. One of the additional stats which is extremely important, but particularly dismal, is the drop in median household income. During the height of the recession from 2007 to 2009, household income dropped $1,006 annually, as you might expect during such a crisis. But during the “recovery” from then until now, how much did it bounce back? It dropped an additional $2,535 per household.
One reason this is so important is that Congress is getting ready to address the Democrat talking point of “income inequality” this year as the elections approach. As I’ve said before, this is one of the more clever bits of populist marketing that the Democrats have cooked up in a long time. But the reality of income inequality hides what should be a rather obvious truth. The “problem” in this country isn’t that we have too many rich people. The real crisis is that we have too many people who can’t get a decent job and miss out on the opportunity to climb the ladder. Obama has had more than a full term to turn things around, and yet his policies have led to increased poverty, not prosperity. Incomes are going down for the working class, not up. So if you want to fix “income inequality” in America, perhaps you should review the jobs data above and reconsider the policies leading to this unacceptable state of affairs.
