Politicians like to take credit for a lot things, even if they didn’t have any participation in the matter. One common trend President Obama takes credit for is the amount of new jobs created since he took over the White House.
In a recent speech he gave to students at the University of Wisconsin, he claimed he created 12.8 million new jobs. Here is the statement:
“And the unemployment rate is now down to 5.3 percent. (Applause.) Keep in mind, when I came into office it was hovering around 10 percent. All told, we’ve now seen 64 straight months of private sector job growth, which is a new record — (applause) — new record — 12.8 million new jobs all told.”
Is it as cut and dry as all that? Not so, says David Stockman, former Reagan budget director and bestselling author of “The Great Deformation.”
He wrote in Newsmax on Monday that the president’s statement is “a pack of context-free factoids.” There is such a thing as the business cycle, notes Stockman.
“The truth of the matter is that America’s employment machine has been failing for this entire century. As shown below, the number of non-farm labor hours utilized during the most recent quarter was only 1 percent higher than in the spring of 2000 — way back when Bill Clinton still had his hands on things in the Oval Office.
“In short, we have gone through two business cycles and have essentially added zero new employment inputs to the US economy.”
What about the quality of jobs, too? That’s something the president often avoids because he doesn’t like to look at the fact that a lot of jobs created have been in the food and retail sectors, ones that are usually low-skilled, low-pay and fewer hours.
The president also took credit for bringing back manufacturing to the U.S. This is another lie, says Stockman.
“There has not been one ‘new’ manufacturing job created during Obama’s term in office; and, in fact, the 12.3 million manufacturing jobs reported for June was still 10 percent below the level of December 2007, and nearly 30 percent lower than the 17.3 million manufacturing jobs reported in January 2000.”
Stockman concluded that there hasn’t been a single new job created in the 21st century.
“In fact, there have been virtually no new jobs — even on a headcount basis — outside of the HES Complex during the entirety of the 21st Century to date!
“One of these days the public sector is going to exhaust its capacity to tax and borrow, and to thereby finance job growth even in the HES Complex.
“Needless to say, Washington and Wall Street will be as clueless then as they are now.”
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