Obama Is Now a Net Job Creator?

[kaylasdad99]

@Fiddle_Peghead

I thought about it in these terms also, but the fact that he is now a net creator would add greatly to how he’s been able to characterize things up to now. Gives it a bit more “zing.”

Well, if he’s a job creator now, we better start TAXING him…

[Sam_Stone]

@Shayna

As far as I know everyone including Democrats are saying jobs haven’t been created fast enough this time, either.

There’s a difference in spin. Back then, the headlines were “JOBLESS RECOVERY”. Now Democrats are trying to spin it as “NET JOB CREATION!”

However, I posted a link to an article that compares President Obama’s recovery to the Bush recovery and there is no question but that factually, in spite of its slowness, Obama’s recovery has been better than Bush’s was.

That’s true, but Obama’s recovery should be MUCH better than Bush’s, because the 1991 recession was milder and put fewer people out of work. See my previous message.

That said, Bush’s recovery was no great shakes either. And I have my theories about that. I think the economy has fundamentally changed since the dot-com crash - government interventions to avoid a steep recession distorted the markets and prevented the fundamental corrections that needed to happen to make the economy healthy again. Rather than correct the structural problems in the economy that rose out of the dot-com bubble, the actions of Bush, the Congress, and the Fed simply ‘fixed’ the problem by inflating a real-estate bubble to replace it.

An in the current recession, the actions of the Fed seem to have been to attempt to inflate a stock market bubble to replace the lost real-estate bubble. And every time one of these bubbles pops, the problem gets worse because it’s all being leveraged with borrowed and printed money. In the meantime, the real economy is floundering, there’s a big mismatch between the skills of the labor pool and the needs of business, and all the shenanigans are spooking small businesses and making them hunker down and not hire.

[Airbeck]

@Sam_Stone

No, the point I was making was that generally job creation is faster after a worse recession than after a milder one. This makes sense, because a deep recession puts a lot more people out of a job, and companies run inventories lower and delay projects to a greater extent and all the rest. So when the economy picks up again, you get a triple effect - there’s a larger shortfall between supply and demand, there’s a bigger hole in the workforce, and there’s a larger labor pool to draw from. The result is usually rapid job creation.

For example, the 1981-1982 recession was quite severe - worse than any others since until the current one. But that recession was followed by GDP growth over 7% and within 2.5 years over 8 million jobs were created.

The 1991 recession was much milder, and in the two years after that, about 2.5 million jobs were created.

The recession in 1975 was fairly steep, and in the two years after that one, about 6 million jobs were created.

Bear in mind that those job numbers were out of a population 1/3 smaller than the current one.

So Obama’s got nothing to crow about when it comes to job creation. Given the number of people who were laid off and the number available for work, it’s really quite pathetic. Whether it’s his fault or not is debatable, but then he’s president and presidents always take the blame.

Umm, I was actually referring to Marley23’s post, the one that Gorsnak was quoting.

So you’re barking up the wrong tree.

[elfkin477]

At the time of their creation, the 600-800,000 census jobs were counted as “created” in monthly jobs reports despite being only a few weeks of work. Are those jobs still part of the 4.3 million figure?

[Simplicio]

@elfkin477

At the time of their creation, the 600-800,000 census jobs were counted as “created” in monthly jobs reports despite being only a few weeks of work. Are those jobs still part of the 4.3 million figure?

No. It’s net jobs. So they would’ve been added to the total in the month they were created, but subtracted the month they ended.