Yesterday, I looked at aggregate job-creation numbers, comparing presidents Bush and Obama. Today, I am looking at the number of private jobs created during President Bush’s eight years and comparing that with President Obama’s record, in order to test the accuracy of Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s claim that President Obama is on track to create more jobs in 2010 than President Bush did in his entire eight years of office.
The chart below shows the monthly changes in private-sector jobs between January 2001 and January 2009:
I think this chart is stunning in a number of ways. Interestingly, if we leave out January 2009 from the calculation, President Bush’s net private-sector job creation is positive: 133,000 jobs. Also, this chart shows that during the Bush years, the country went through two recessions — I never realized how bad the first recession was until I looked at the data. In the first year and a half, 3.4 million jobs were lost.
Overall, during Bush’s eight years in office, 7.6 million jobs were created. As I mentioned yesterday, the net number is negative, mainly because of the overwhelming number of job losses during his last month in office. So far, under President Obama’s tenure, some 938,000 jobs have been created — after losing 3.2 million private jobs. And it could get worse. According to the front page of the New York Times today:
Less than a month before November elections, the United States is mired in a grim New Normal that could last for years. That has policy makers, particularly the Federal Reserve, considering a range of ever more extreme measures, as noted in the minutes of its last meeting, released Tuesday. [. . .]
Even top Obama officials concede the unemployment rate could climb higher still.
The main conclusions to take from this data are, first, the total inaccuracy of the claim that Obama has almost created more jobs than Bush did and, perhaps more importantly, that the 21st century has so far not been a good one for the private sector.
Its important to note that this is the CHANGE in jobs from month to month.
In other words, job loss each month has accelerated to the present condition where we are LOSING around 800,000 jobs EVERY month.
The hole has been getting deeper on an increasingly steeper slope.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAlso note that the Bush bubble is largely a real estate bubble which was artificial as it was based on subsidized leveraging (for which we are paying now).
The usual manufacturing contribution was slight then and less so now.
In short, we stopped making things about ten years ago.
We have stopped creating wealth.
The solution is to dig, drill, and manufacture our way out of this with ventures that have positive cash flows.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseInteresting stuff. It caused me to suddenly and without warning wonder about the job as a unit of analysis.
If we're interested in measuring market demand for labor (broadly defined) isn't the job a somewhat arbitrary quanta? I suppose it's well known by now what sort of artifacts this introduces, what gets hidden, what gets amplified, what just gets noisy. But I sure don't know these things, and wish I did so I could conclude more from wonderful charts like these.
Maybe government jobs are up because productivity is down in that sector? Seems plausible. Maybe private sector jobs growth is slow because private sector productivity is up? Also plausible.
I guess the job as a unit of analysis is a nod to the political aspect of political economy. A job is a vote. There's not a comparably fixed relationship between man-hours and votes, or output and votes.
I'm glad I found another way to make a living - if I were an economist my head would have exploded long ago. I'm grateful to people like de Rugy who carry this burden for all of us.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNot mentioned in this post, and what does not receive much comment is that all of the negative employment stats in the last two years of the Bush administration occurred after the Democrats took control of Congress in 2006 and started putting in place their budgets and "bad for business" policies.
Nor does it take into consideration that the economic mess that occurred in late 2008 was occasioned by the bad housing policies put in place by the Democrats who refused to put in policies recommended by Bush and other Republicans that might have prevented this disaster from occurring. All of which Obama voted to approve!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOne other thing about those deep recessions at the beginning of Dubya's term......
I don't remember him blaming Bill Clinton for them, do you?
Not once.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse