Obama Jobs By The Numbers [Reader Post]

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President Obama recently claimed the economy grew by some two millions jobs. This claim was on a seasonally adjusted basis to the middle of 2011. We expect politicians to put their best foot forward and also put the best face they can on their performance, however, as with all things to do with Obama, his rhetoric does not match reality. His claims typically come with an expiration date or a dictionary in liberal speak is needed to decipher his rhetoric into normal understanding. In Obama’s view of the world, we the average person are at fault for not properly understanding what he says, he can’t help if you are not of sufficient intelligence or understanding to grasp the reality of his statements.

Since it’s upon us to elevate our understanding, let’s examine the Bureau of Labor Statistics raw unmassaged numbers to see what actually happened since this recession took hold with a vengeance. Using 2008 as the base year we see some interesting things. Total Employment (total of full and part time workers) on an annual basis was 143,194,000 people holding jobs. In 2009 the first year of his presidency, total employment dropped to 137,775,000. 5,419,000 people lost their jobs in 2009. By 2010, having spent billions on stimulating the economy, and increasing the annual federal budget deficits by over a trillion dollars a year, total employment dropped to 136,858,000. Instead of creating jobs, the total number of people who lost their jobs cumulatively increased to 6,336,000 since 2008. So far by the numbers can you see where President Obama’s policies created 2 million jobs?

However, total employment as a number is vague since it includes both Full Time workers and Part Time workers. If you worked 1 hour a week, you are counted as equal to someone who works 40 in the BLS numbers that figure the unemployment rate calculation. Going back to the BLS numbers and splitting out the part timers to see actually how many full time positions there are (greater than 34 hours/week) we begin to see the full impact of President Obama’s policies. In 2008, there were 118,416,000 full time workers on an annual basis. In all of 2009 after the first year of Obama’s policy subscriptions there were 110,612,000 full time workers, in other words 7,804,000 full timers actually lost their jobs. By 2010 the work force shrank to 110,203 full time workers representing a cumulative loss of 8,213,000 jobs. Jobs that mostly had benefits like health insurance. By the way, you won’t hear this from the MSM because this doesn’t fit the Obama re-election narrative.

In 2008, on an annual basis there were 24,778,000 part time workers (1 – 34 hours/week). This number represents both those who did so for non economic reasons and those who due to circumstances losing their full time job took a part time to make ends meet. In all of 2009 influenced by Obama’s first year policy choices part time employment rose by 2,385,000 to 27,163,000. This increase we see was at the expense of full time employment since both Full and Total Employment dropped during this period. By 2010, part time employment settled down to 26,655,000, still cumulatively 1,877,000 greater than 2008. So, is this what President Obama is claiming as mission accomplished?

The question then becomes, is an increase in part time employment a legitimate sign of recovery and a bonafide improvement of jobs? Let’s look at the percentages. Full employment as a percentage of total employment dropped from 82.7% in 2008 to 80.5% in 2010 on an annual basis. Part time employment increased from 17.3% of all jobs in 2008 to 19.5% in 2010. These are not encouraging results especially when total employment is dropping.

If government policy is the prime mover of the economy as liberals claim, then by their own standards, President Obama’s policies have been a miserable failure. The reality is while governments can influence the economy, they can’t drive it. In our case, what ails the US economy is the policy subscriptions of the Obama regime. ObamaCare, the centerpiece of Obama’s policies, as it has come to be called puts a stiff penalty on any business who provides health insurance as a benefit. If it were not so, then why have over a 1000 businesses applied and received waivers from it’s provisions? The reality is for a business to avoid the health care penalty is to hire only part time workers. The facts speak for themselves here and quite clearly demonstrated by the hiring demographics.

Speaking of policies, it goes without saying that the Obama regime has done everything it can do to discourage domestic energy production in terms of oil and natural gas drilling. Thousands of jobs were lost to Louisiana due to the illegal permit ban on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Contrast this with North Dakota, where unemployment is at 3.2% as of May. Bismark, North Dakota has a 2.9% unemployment rate!! A drilling boom is underway on the Bakken Shale Formation. Of course, the government is actively attempting to discourage this development by making absurd claims that the Fracking process is polluting the water table. With around to $300 billion a year of our oil supplies being outsourced due to the reluctance of liberal Democrats and their allies in the environmental lobby to allow domestic drilling, as a result literally millions of high paying jobs were also outsourced along with that energy production. If the GDP of the US economy is approx. $15 trillion, that $300 billion represents 2% of the economic impact and roughly 2.7 million jobs shipped out of the country. Both the loss of the oil royalties and income tax revenue is considerable to the Treasury, yet we have Democrats clambering for a tax increase when literally billions are ripe for the picking.

The sad part demonstrating this failed policy is not one drop of oil was saved and worse, the environmental damage was greater than it would have been under the stricter US requirements if the drilling were done here. Apparently, it’s ok to damage the environment in a foreign country where it is not observed while making the superficial NIMBY claim you’re for the environment. Between the Ethanol scam which many environmental groups now admit doesn’t help the environment and the outsourcing of oil drilling which doesn’t reduce oil consumption, AGW is demonstrated to be revenue raising ploy by a government that is unable to sell a tax increase to a burdened public. This same nonsense is about to play out with the coal industry via EPA regulations. We know what ails the US economy, it’s called Barack Obama.

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I know it is just anecdotal but….

Our business employs 47 people right now.
It used to be 50 but a death and two who left were not replaced.
The remaining 47 pulled the load for what was 50.

On top of that, none of the 47 are working 40 hours a week anymore.
At least once a week everyone is sent home at noon.
This move is saving the jobs of all 47 but it is a crimp on the lifestyles of all 47 as well.

One family is in foreclosure because of lack of funds.
One family has eaten into their own children’s college savings to make up the slack.
Many employees have cut their contributions to their 401Ks.
At least three younger workers have moved back in with parents.

So, everyday I see the truth in your post, Dan.

Dan Scott says: ‘as with all things to do with Obama, his rhetoric does not match reality.’

I have no problem understanding his rhetoric…

“if we hadn’t passed the stimulus bill, we’d have seen even worse economic performance than we have and we’d have worse unemployment to boot”. Compared to what?
Source: http://www.qando.net/?author=3

Ever notice how this Administration makes a lot of “claims” which cannot be measured against anything ? How many times have we heard; If we didn’t do ‘X’, things “would have been a lot worse” had ‘X’ not been done… Or, “because we did XYZ” – ‘X’ amount of jobs were saved… etc… etc… etc… How can anyone know? Its all speculation. It’s all Obama rhetoric…

This administration is brilliant at manipulating non-factual statistics against non-existent statistics. Sadly many Americans are very gullible…

We all know that Obamas logic is ‘twisted’, and he lies a lot!

One little chart torches the Obama lies …

Recovery, Third Year, And Counting

Obamacare covers part time employee too. It has a formula for converting part time to full time so there is no escape by hiring only part time employees.

The real killer in Obamacare is that the employer must cover the employee and their entire family and that the employee can pay no more than 9.8% of their household income. The cost of health insurance for an employee who makes $20,000 per year ($10 per hour) is projected to be $16,000 per year in 2016, of which the employer will be required to pay about $14,000. So a $20,000 employee will really cost $34,000 plus other benefits.

If the employer cancels his insurance, the penalty is $2,000 per employee per year. If the employer provides insurance and makes a mistake, the penalty is $3,000. The solution for most smaller employers will be to cancel their insurance, pay the $2,000 penalty, and let Mr. Obama provide their insurance. Then the $20,000 employee will pay only about $750 and Mr. Obama will pay the rest from his stash. That is what my company plans to do.

@tarpon:
Good chart, tarpon.
The one on that site here proves that Obama’s spending and NOT SS and Medicare is the problem.

Good post, Dan. Thanks.

Tarpon: In your chart, did you notice that the recovery times get longer with every recession? I see a trend there.

Nan G: Hang in there.

The pink 2009 line should start at the same level where the dark blue 2008 line left off, right? Except it doesn’t. Ditto 2010 and 2011. Raw unmassaged data? HA! Another bogus chart from the anti-Obama propaganda team.

@Wilson:

The pink 2009 line should start at the same level where the dark blue 2008 line left off, right? Except it doesn’t. Ditto 2010 and 2011. Raw unmassaged data? HA! Another bogus chart from the anti-Obama propaganda team.

The recessions graphed in Tarpon’s chart are the 1981, the 1990, the 2001 and the 2007.
Each of them starts at the last peak employment number before the recession.
That is the set point of ZERO on the left-hand side of the graph in the case of every recession.
Then, as each recession runs its course, we see how large a % of job loss there is RELATIVE to the peak employment point.
Thus Obama’s line reaches just more than a 6% from peak employment.
(We have never been at FULL employment, even in the best roaring economy there are about 3% to 4% unemployed.)

Take a look at those same recessions (and a few others) depicted two different ways here and here.

No matter how you center the various recessions since WWII Obama’s is the worst.
The only worse one was the Great Depression and Obama’s is closing in on that one on various fronts.

For non-high school graduates since Obama has been in office their unemployment rate has been between 14% and 16%.
During Bush that same group’s numbers were between 6% and 9%, still the highest of all the unemployed.

How does the Obama administration keep the unemployment percentage to 9.2%? By dropping people from the work force rolls. Since May, 2009, the number of people in the work force has been dropped by almost 1 1/2 million people, from 154,805,000 to 153,421. Now, while part of that can be attributed by the people who have retired, it does not account for the number of high school/college graduates that have entered the work force. As a matter of fact, between the years 2004-2008, the work force rolls increased in July over the May/June totals, representing the newly graduated into the work force. Since 2009, the number of the work force has decreased in July after May/June graduations. It is obvious that those newly graduated looking for jobs were counted in the Bush administration but not in the Obama administration since those kids are not eligible for unemployment, most never having held a job before. From May, 2011 to June, 2011, 272,000 workers were dropped from the work force rolls, in just one month.

On January 10, 2009, just ten short days before Obama was sworn in, he released his think-tank report, the Bernstein-Romer (yeah, of Christine Romer fame) that showed how the Stimulus bill would affect unemployment. The study included a chart shown both with, and without, the Stimulus. The report says: “even with the prototypical package, the unemployment rate in 2010Q4 (fourth quarter of 2010) is predicted to be approximately 7.0%, which is well below the approximately 8.8% that would result in the absence of a plan.” The chart shows that without the Stimulus Bill, unemployment would peak in 2010Q1 at 9% and remain there until 2010Q3, at which time it would start to decrease until it reached 5% in 2014Q1. WITH the Stimulus Bill, unemployment was predicted to peak at 7.8% in 2009Q3 and then decrease to the same 2014Q1 percentage of 5%. Unemployment was predicted by Bernstein-Romer to be currently at 6.7%, not the 9.2% we have.

It was this report that the administration hung its hat on and rushed through the Stimulus Bill. But the reality is that we still have 9.2% unemployment (not taking into consideration the 1 1/2 million dropped from the workforce) and a debt that is now almost $900 billion higher. The truth of the matter is that the Stimulus Bill did not create jobs, but simply propped up the states who were seeing revenues drop due to high unemployment rates and lack of consumer confidence. So those states used that money to meet the salary requirements of already existing jobs of state & municipal workers/teachers. And althought those jobs were not yet lost, the Administration is counting them as [re]created jobs based on the fact that it was estimated those jobs would be lost with the federal government bailing out state budgets, all at a cost of over $250,000/per job.

The Obama administration, along with the opinions of Christine Romer (who is currently preaching for more stimulus money in a second package) and the Stimulus Bill have all been a major fail. Of course, Obama is preaching his “tax the rich” philosophy, thinking that the money that lands in D.C. from taxing higher income earners, and which lands with a thud one it hits D.C., is the answer. Nevermind that the higher income earners didn’t gain their wealth by putting their money in the bank, or under their mattresses, but by creating company expansion and consequently more jobs. Obama doesn’t seem to understand even basic Economics 101, that teaches you that the more product you sell, the more jobs are required to create that product and the more tax that flows into the federal coffers. As Nan will tell you, if you have a company that employes 50 people, and demand for your product inceases by just 10%, you require 5 more people to produce that product.