Obama, the Job Killer?

It’s an oft-repeated claim by the Right: Obama is a job killer. If we don’t put a Republican in the White House soon, a “job creator” who can reverse the devastation that Barack Obama has wrought upon the U.S. economy, America may become a dystopian wasteland in which roaming gangs of cannibals prowl the streets, hunting their fellow man for sustenance…or something like that. Okay, that last part may just be the plot of a script I wrote called Cannibal Carnage. I sent a copy of it to several production companies about eight years ago, and I’m still waiting to hear back from them. Fingers crossed!!!

Much of the blame for Obama’s “job killing” has been placed on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), commonly referred to as Obamacare, which all of the current Republican candidates running for president promise to repeal in toto if they are elected in November. What they will replace it with…well, don’t worry about it. They’ve got a plan, but you’ll have to put them in the White House if you want to see it.

Bobby Jindal, ex-Governor of Louisiana and amateur exorcist, once said of the ACA, “Why not delay all of the mandates in Obamacare [which] has become such a job killer in our economy.” Ted Cruz, Canada’s least favorite son, said, “It’s been a disaster. It is the biggest job-killer in this country; millions of Americans have lost their jobs.” Marco Rubio said that the ACA was a “certified job-killer”. So, is Obama in general (and the ACA in particular) really a job killer? Is Obama a Marxist who has crushed businesses large and small in an attempt to destroy capitalism?

Let us begin by looking at what President Obama was faced with when he took office in January, 2009. Mr. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, inherited a 4.2% unemployment rate (courtesy of Bill Clinton). When he left office the nation was in a recession and unemployment was at 7.8%. I guess “trickledown economics” didn’t quite trickle down the way it was expected to. When Obama sat behind his desk in the Oval Office for the first time he found himself sitting at the helm of a nation that was losing 700,000 jobs a month, and whose stock market was sinking faster than the Titanic.

An economy in freefall can’t be turned around on a dime, and over the first nine months of Obama’s presidency the unemployment rate continued to rise, peaking at 10.1% in October, 2009, two months before Obama’s greatest “job killing” bill, the ACA,  would be passed by the Senate. Since then the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.9%, the lowest it has been since February, 2008. Here is a graph showing the official unemployment rate over the last ten years (recession period shaded gray):

 Source: MacroTrends

“But how can this be?”, some of you may be asking. Didn’t Donald Trump say that the real unemployment rate may be as high as 42%? Trump’s claim seems to have been gleaned from a column by Ronald Reagan’s budget director David Stockman. Politifact explains Strockman’s reasoning thusly:

Stockman calculated that there are currently 210 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 68 -- what he calls a "plausible measure of the potential workforce." If you assume that each of those people is able to hold down a full-time job, he wrote, they would offer a total of 420 billion potential working hours. However, during 2014, Stockman noted, only 240 billion working hours were actually recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Using this formula Strockman calculated that the unemployment rate was really 42.9%. However, as the same Politifact article makes clear, Strockman’s calculation treats people working part-time hours as partly unemployed,  and doesn’t account for the valid reasons why many part-time workers may be doing so by choice, e.g. parents unable to work full-time because of child-rearing duties, students who are balancing work and school, and the disabled.

“Okay,” you may concede, “the official unemployment rate, also called the U-3 rate, may be 4.9%, but what about the U-6 rate, which includes those who are officially unemployed as well as those who are working part time for economic reasons and those who are ‘marginally attached’ to the work force?”

And I would ask, “Why are you speaking like that? Talk like a normal person!”

It’s true that the U-6 rate, now and always, is higher than the U-3 rate. The current U-6 rate is 9.9%, down from a high of 17.4% in the same month that the official unemployment rate peaked in 2009, and from 14%, which was where it was at in the month that Obama first took office. Another graph showing the unemployment rate over the last 22 years (U-3 in red, U-6 in green):

Source: MacroTrends

As stated above George W. Bush left office with a U-6 rate of 14%  compared to 7.3% when he took office. So we see that both the U-3 and U-6 rates have markedly improved under Obama compared to where they were when he started his first term.

Yet 53% of Republicans still think the unemployment rate has risen under Obama, a misconception happily reinforced by the Right-Wing Spin Machine and the party’s presidential candidates. The truth is that under Obama the economy has had a record 71 straight months of private-sector job growth, while the size of the government, which the Right claims is too big and bloated, actually shrunk.

Here are three charts showing the performance of Bush v. Obama using three different measurements, fig. 1:  private sector job creation,  fig 2: official (i.e. U-3) unemployment rates, and  fig. 3: corporate after-tax profits (this last puts the lie to the Right’s claims that Obama is a Far Left Socialist who has spent seven years destroying business in this country):

fig. 1

fig, 2

fig. 3

Source: ourfuture.org

There is a saying attributed to former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York): Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. The 53% of Republicans who think unemployment has gone up under Obama are not entitled to their own facts, to say nothing of the 43% who believe he his is a Muslim,  or the 35% who believe he was born outside of the United States. Neither Obama, nor the ACA, is a job killer. It’s not just me saying that; reality is saying that.

Lastly, let’s talk about the ACA, a bill that the Right warned would lead us down the road to jackboot Socialism, mass unemployment and ultimately the death of the American Dream. Since 2010 the rate of uninsured Americans has fallen from 16% to 9%:

Source: Forbes

That seven point drop isn’t just a number--it’s millions of Americans who no longer have to worry about what will happen if they get sick, Americans who will no longer have to wait until a treatable condition escalates and become untreatable, who will no longer be clogging emergency rooms for illnesses that would be more cost-effectively treated by a family doctor. People no longer have to fear that they will be denied health coverage because they have a pre-existing condition, or that they will be dropped on a technicality if they already have insurance and they get sick, or hit an arbitrary cap on benefits set by their insurer.

How many more Americans would have to access to life-saving health coverage if the governors of the 19 states that have refuse to expand their Medicare programs (nearly all of these states being governed by Republicans) would stop their political posturing? How many people have died, or will die, because a small group of people, many of whom pride themselves on their Christian values, have decided that turning their noses up at the President is more important than the health of their citizens?



sources:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate
http://www.macrotrends.net/1339/unemployment-rate-last-ten-years
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/20/the-amount-of-misinformation-about-our-economy-is-amazing/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/02/26/is-obamacare-a-job-killer/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/09/05/obama-outperforms-reagan-on-jobs-growth-and-investing/#1efb688820bc
http://www.forbes.com/sites/dandiamond/2015/11/05/americas-uninsured-rate-is-now-historically-low/#71964ef76f70
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/jan/29/ted-cruz/ted-cruzs-pants-fire-claim-health-care-law-nations/
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/30/donald-trump/donald-trump-says-unemployment-rate-may-be-42-perc/
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/01/cruz-claims-%E2%80%9Cmillions%E2%80%9D-have-lost-their-jobs-because-obamacare
http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/02/26/rubio-and-cruz-echo-right-wing-media-with-their/208840
http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/08/news/economy/us-economy-jobs-second-best-year-since-1999/
http://obamacarefacts.com/uninsured-rates/
http://historyinpieces.com/research/us-unemployment-rates-president
https://ourfuture.org/20141208/bush-vs-obama-on-the-economy-in-3-simple-charts
https://www.dpcc.senate.gov/?p=blog&id=462
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/01/14/job-shifts-under-obama-fewer-government-workers-more-caregivers-servers-and-temps/
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/02/americans-obama-anti-christ-conspiracy-theories
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2015/09/01/iowa-poll-republicans-believe-obama-not-born-us/71502150/
http://familiesusa.org/product/50-state-look-medicaid-expansion