Job Creation

About those 4 million jobs Obama has created in the private sector…

It seems that such a boast ought to be easy to verify, but I’ve been reading article after article and all I get is bias from the left and the right.

First, one must look at the source and the motive.  Sarah Jessica Parker was pitching an Obama fundraiser.  Now, Parker is a lot of things, mostly an actress who has played the promiscuous blonde on TV and in movies for the last couple of decades.  I don’t really rely on her for accurate economic data.

Of course, she didn’t make up that number.  It has been an Obama talking point for a couple of years now. 

And the footnote takes you back to official executive branch data from the BLS.  So, they are getting the information from the charts and graphs.  But is the data being interpreted properly?

Job creation like that should have had a significant impact on the unemployment numbers – right?  Well, maybe not.  We issue a million green cards a year to foreigners.  Obama hasn’t slowed that down.  And as Samuel Gompers points out, immigration is essentially a labor issue.  People come here to work.

On top of that, there have been three years worth of college graduates and others entering the market.  So, let’s assume that a healthy economy would need perhaps 2.5 million jobs A YEAR just to break even.  That makes the four-million-job boast seem rather anemic, eh?

Now, no one really understands the BLS data.  When they talked about 450,000 new jobless claims every week in the unemployment reports, that never made any sense to me.  If you do the math that means 5 million unemployed people in four months time.  I think they mean new AND continuing unemployment claims.

But that brings up the next snafu.  When benefits run out, the number drops.  The poor stiff didn’t find a job; he just ran out of benefits.  And it certainly doesn’t include the UNDERemployed (like me) who are working for less than half of what we were making before.

Where do they fit in to the Parker/Obama boast of all those new jobs?

One analysis suggests that if the BLS continues to sweep the long-term unemployed off the bottom of the chart the unemployment rate will be zero by election day.
Source link: http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2012/01/07/obama_unemployment_magic_trick_indefinitely_detain_4_million_people_from_workforce

Once again, we are left to guess at the validity of the claim.  It doesn’t feel like a good economy, but who knows?  One thing’s for sure; only a fool would accept “trust me,” from any politician.