Jobs: Reagan versus Obama: A Straightforward Comparison

American Thinker ^ | 08/25/2012 | Otto Sorenson

[SeekAndFind]

Stephanie Cutter, President Obama's deputy campaign manager, recently boasted to Willie Geist of MSNBC that, from an employment perspective, the recovery of the economy under President Obama compares favorably with the Reagan recovery. Her claim seemed adequately outlandish to warrant comparing the two recoveries based on two criteria of central importance to the American people:

"the net number of new jobs created and the change in the number of people of working age who are either unemployed or not in the workforce (and therefore not counted as unemployed)."

In each case I used unadjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics from the month which was the trough of the recession experienced at the beginning of each President's term of office. Those months were January 1983 and January 2010. I then compared that data to the identical data from January of 1989 and July of this year. The results are as follows.

The Reagan recovery, encompassing a period of 72 months, resulted in the creation of 24,833,000 net new jobs, or approximately 344,900 jobs per month. Over that same period the total number of people of working age who were either unemployed or not in the workforce decreased by 5,234,000, or approximately 72,700 per month.

The Obama recovery, encompassing a period of 31 months, has resulted in the creation of 6,317,000 net new jobs, or approximately 203,800 jobs per month. Over that same period, the total number of people of working age who are either unemployed or not in the labor force increased by 205,000, or approximately 6,600 per month.

[SeekAndFind]

	Reagan	Obama
Net New Jobs Per Month	344,900	203,800
Change in Number of Workers Unemployed or Not in Work Force Per Month	-72,700	+6,600

[Old Retired Army Guy]

Does anybody still believe the phoney numbers coming out of the Obama campaign?

[TomGuy]

Posted by Stand Watch Listen in thread:
Obama's Latest Whopper: He Created More Jobs Than Reagan!

[SeekAndFind]

RE: Does anybody still believe the phoney numbers coming out of the Obama campaign?

Well, Obama is still leading in many polls... What does that tell us?

[p. henry]

This election (and many elections to come) will be a “base” election, i.e. it will won by the party that best mobilizes its base. That’s why I don’t put a lot of stock in even likely voter polls. The turnout model is just too unpredictable. My own feeling at this point is that the pro-Obama vote is not really motivated and that the anti-Obama vote is pretty darned enthusiastic. I think it will be like 2010 with increased animus against Obama being tempered somewhat by the fact that it is a Presidential election, rather than a midterm, and more of the clueless will therefore vote.

[hawaiianninja]

LOL. And you believe the polls put out by the liberal media?

Personally, I don't really care about the polls this leftist administration or the leftist media puts out. My only concern comes in November: I pray that of us voters come out in droves to pick Romney, and that his win is by such a large margin, the 0 and Democrats won't be able to cheat.