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Bush vs. Obama — Unemployment Rates and Annual Deficits
But it's all Bush's fault, right?
As we head into the 2012 campaign season, we’re bound to hear a lot more from President Obama how everything good is because of him and how everything bad is because of Bush. So let’s take another look at unemployment rates and annual deficits under Bush and Obama, courtesy of Don Surber: [emphasis added below]
Yes, that 8.9% unemployment rate is so much better than the 6.6% rate in President Bush 43′s final year in office — or the 4.7% in 2007 when Barack Obama decided the economy was so bad that he was going to fix it.
He fixed it all right.
$1 of every $10 in the national economy now comes from federal borrowing. Indeed welfare is the largest growth industry in the nation as food stamp recipients jumped from 29 million on the day he took office to 46 million when last counted in October. That’s a 44% increase.
But the liberal know-it-alls at Talking Points Memo and elsewhere prattle on and on about how we must keep running up our national debt or else the economy will fail.
Averaging more than 9% unemployment in your presidency while the guy before you was at 5% is failure.
Balanced budgets in the 1950s, the late 1960s and the late 1990s coincided with economic good times. Where we blew it was not riding out a simple recession in each case.
Something to keep in mind: Democrats controlled BOTH houses of Congress from January 2007 until the November 2010 elections. And as you can clearly see on the charts above, unemployment and budget deficits both skyrocketed under their watch.
Jeff at Protein Wisdom posted this chart (modifying an Obama campaign chart) which clarifies when jobs started coming back. (h/t: Gateway Pundit)
Something else to keep in mind: The only reason unemployment is now being reported as below 9% is because over a million discouraged workers have left the workforce entirely.
The percentage of adults in the labor force is a figure that economists call the participation rate. It is 64.2 percent, the smallest since 1984. And that’s become a mystery to economists. Normally after a recession, an improving economy lures job seekers back into the labor market. This time, many are staying on the sidelines.
Their decision not to seek work means the drop in unemployment from 9.8 percent in November [2010] to 9 percent in April [2011] isn’t as good as it looks.
If the 529,000 missing workers had been out scavenging for a job without success, the unemployment rate would have been 9.3 percent in April, not the reported rate of 9 percent. And if the participation rate were as high as it was when the recession began, 66 percent, in December 2007, the unemployment rate could have been as high as 11.5 percent.
According to government statistics, if the same number of people were seeking work today as in 2007, the jobless rate would be 11 percent.
Contrary to what the Obama campaign would have you believe, ever-increasing government spending DOES NOT create hope. Or jobs. It just creates change…in the wrong direction.
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UPDATE: The Congressional Budget Office released a report this month, titled “Understanding and Responding to Persistently High Unemployment” and it details the truly catastrophic nature of the Obama economy. From the summary:
The rate of unemployment in the United States has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, making the past three years the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unemployment rate will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The official unemployment rate excludes those individuals who would like to work but have not searched for a job in the past four weeks as well as those who are working part-time but would prefer full-time work; if those people were counted among the unemployed, the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent. Compounding the problem of high unemployment, the share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months—referred to as the long-term unemployed—topped 40 percent in December 2009 for the first time since 1948, when such data began to be collected; it has remained above that level ever since.
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UPDATE: The Republican Study Committee released this chart today on jobs under Obama. (h/t: Instapundit)
(Click Image for High Resolution Version)
Tomorrow, February 17, 2012, will be exactly 3 years since President Obama signed his infamous stimulus package into law. It was a plan designed to create jobs by growing the size of government, and its record has not been good.
Democrats said their costly plan ($1.2 trillion, including interest) would “save or create” up to 4 million jobs and bring the unemployment rate down to about 6% today. The unemployment rate has not fallen below 8% at any point in the last 36 months. Furthermore, the official unemployment rate does not actually count unemployed people who have given up looking for work.
The above chart shows the “labor force participation rate.” This statistic represents the share of working-age Americans who are either employed or unemployed but looking for work. It is not a pretty picture. Only 63.7% of working-age Americans are currently in the workforce – the lowest in almost 29 years!
To put it another way, 36.3% of working-age Americans do not have a job and are not even looking.
After 3 years of failure, it’s time to try something that will work. Let’s ramp up energy production. Let’s cut away government red tape that slows down job creation. And let’s design a new tax code that is simpler, flatter, and fairer. Let’s pass the Jobs Through Growth Act, and create jobs by growing the economy – not the government.
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RELATED: Why the Obama Economy SHOULD decide the 2012 election
Posted by FullMetalPatriot
12th gen. American, Constitutionalist, Harley-riding Texan, gun owner & NRA member, blogger, illustrator, Florida Gator alumnus. #TCOT
12th gen. American, Constitutionalist, Harley-riding Texan, gun owner & NRA member, blogger, illustrator, Florida Gator alumnus. #TCOT
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