If anyone still doubts that Obama has given the U.S. economy a bad case of anemia, look no further than the nearby graph.
Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the staff of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC) compared the private sector job-creation records of Obama, President Reagan, and the average after every recession since 1960 that lasted more than one year. According to these hard numbers, Obama wheezes behind Reagan. Also, Obama is — literally — below average.
At the end of the latest recession, private-sector employment stood at 108.4 million Americans. In April 2015, 70 months after the end, in June 2009, of the recession that Obama inherited, private-sector employment was 119.5 million. Over the same period, an average recovery would have pushed that figure to 125.2 million. Meanwhile, a recovery at the pace set by Ronald Reagan would have seen private-sector employment zoom to 131.5 million.
As Representative Kevin Brady (R., Texas), vice chairman of the JEC, observed, “Instead of shrinking, the Obama recovery’s jobs gap got bigger for a fourth consecutive month and now stands at 5,730,000,” versus the average post-1960 recovery. “Compared with the Reagan recovery of the 1980s, the gap stands at 12,082,000.”
Obama has a long way to go, if he wants to catch up with Reagan’s sterling performance, or at least lift himself to the average level.
“Eliminating the Obama recovery’s private-sector jobs gap compared with the average of post-1960 recoveries by the end of 2016 would require the addition of 431,000 private-sector jobs in each of the next 20 months,” Brady calculates. “Closing the gap compared with the Reagan recovery would require 817,000 private-sector jobs in each of the next 20 months.”
In short, Obama’s job-creation record is sub-par — a term he surely understands after at least 223 rounds of golf while in the White House.
If Obama has any interest in leaving office as anything other than a national embarrassment in this category, he should stop dissing the Republican Congress and immediately cooperate with them to enact dramatic, sweeping cuts in income- and corporate-tax rates — much like those that helped President Reagan create conditions that powered job growth to a level that still remains stunning, 33 years later.