Reality About Job Situation
It is no secret that I believe the 2009 Stimulus worked and truly turned around the faltering (wildly collapsing) economy that this country faced.
Obviously, we would like to see even faster job creation, but the idea that President Obama has failed just doesn't comport with the facts.
Any fair and objective look at the actual monthly job creation/losses numbers demonstrates how far we had fallen at the end of the Bush Presidency and how far we have recovered during the Obama Presidency.
From 2005-2008 (Bush's second term), we saw steady declines in the annual net jobs numbers:
2005 - 2.5 million jobs
2006 - 2.1 million jobs
2007 - 1.1 million jobs
2008 - -3.6 million jobs
By the end of the Bush Presidency the nation was bleeding jobs at a horrible pace with hundreds of thousands of jobs being lost every month. It is easy to see the horrible figures in 2008 that clearly worsened month after month. In January 2009, when President Obama took office, the U.S. economy shed 818,000 jobs.
The Stimulus was passed in late February 2009 and one can see that within three months the jobs numbers had significantly improved. In the last two and a half years we have seen about 4 million net jobs created. Certainly the trends are now in the right direction. It took years to create the horrible mess at the end of Bush Presidency and it will take years to correct the mess, but at least we are on our way.
posted by Rob @ 9/05/2012 10:12:00 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
The numbers for 2005, 2006 and 2007are POSITIVE, so jobs were CREATED in those years. I would take those numbers any time over the situation now. For '09,there was a net LOSS of 5 million!
Dennis
"A 1/32 Cherokee Tea Party guy having fun"
"The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries." --Barack Obama-Tampa, Fla., Jan. 28, 2010
Yes, they were declining significantly - obviously things were worsening.
A President comes to office and cannot change things right away. We see that after the Stimulus was passed, the long period of declining job numbers turned around.
If you don't want to be objective and fair, that is fine, but we don't have any reason to discuss the issue further. I would argue that it is completely unreasonable to expect any President to completely change the U.S. Economy on day 1 of his Presidency. If that is what you believe then there is no reason for further discussion.
Yes, the job numbers continued to decline until Feb. 2010. Obama has had nearly 4 years to turn the country around and he's failed by any objective measure. Since the stimulus passed, we've been stuck with zero real growth and a chronically abysmal job situation.
Without the stimulus, we would have had a robust recovery.
It's time for Obama to go.
Dennis
"A 1/32 Cherokee Tea Party guy having fun"
I have no idea how doing nothing when jobs are disappearing and GDP is cratering would result in a robust economy.
By doing nothing I assume that you mean it would be the Federal Government doing nothing. If the stimulus wasn't passed, the Federal Government would be doing less, but it wouldn't be doing nothing. The government would still be spending far too much, it just would have done less. This would have enabled the free market to do more. The stimulus acted like a sugar high. It produced some increased economic activity for a short period, but things have stalled because the private sector is doing less. Now is the time to reduce Federal income taxes for EVERYONE (at least for the 50% who still pay these taxes) and to cut Federal spending. That will increase consumer confidence and convince corporations to start investing. The trick is to have the private sector, not the Federal government, start doing more. As Thomas Jefferson said " I am not a friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive."
Dennis
"A 1/32 Cherokee Tea Party guy having fun"
"The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits." - Thomas Jefferson
We just disagree. If you can show me a time where that actually worked, I will look at it, but I am not familiar with ANY case where an economic crisis was helped by reverse-Keynesian policies which cut government spending.
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