What a Crappy Century So Far! Obama's Terrible Job Creation Stats Remind Us How Bad Bush Was!
Over at National Review's The Corner, Reason columnist and Mercatus Center economist Veronique de Rugy documents just how rotten the 21st century has been for job creation in these United States. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) is telling a whopper about how President Obama's job creation numbers are better than President Bush's.
De Rugy helpfully charts monthly job numbers for Bush and Obama and there's no question that Obama has been a disaster. But Bush looks good only by comparison. Take a gander and then doublecheck to make sure you haven't been pink-slipped during the time that it took to read this post:
De Rugy notes that there's no way to easily compare jobs under a guy in office for eight terrible years and a guy in office for less than two really terrible years. But the raw numbers tell a tale that neither president nor party should be proud of:
Under Bush, private employment shrank by 673,000 jobs, federal employment grew by 50,000 jobs, and government employment grew by 1,753,000 jobs.
Under Obama, the private sector has shed some 2.9 million jobs while the federal government has grown by 40,000 (after growing massively, the federal workforce shrank throughout the summer). Total government jobs, however, shrank by 357,000 jobs, mainly because of cuts at the state and local levels.