The economy has lost 316,000 jobs under President Barack Obama, though most of the job losses happened at the beginning of Obama’s presidency during the height of the Great Recession, according to research analyzing Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
“In theory, we are exactly at three years into the recovery,” Veronique de Rugy, senior fellow at the Mercatus Center and author of the new research, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“It is the slowest recovery ever,” she added. “I would claim that there’s really no recovery at all.”
“The last twelve months have seen the slowest wage growth ever. We also have the slowest economic growth compared to any other recovery.”
Compared with that of each president since 1945, Obama ranks dead last in job creation, losing 316,000 jobs. Presidents Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan hold the top two slots for jobs created during their tenure. During Clinton’s tenure 22.7 million jobs were created and 16.1 million were created under Reagan.
De Rugy cautioned that her analysis isn’t meant to compare Obama, who is still serving out his first term, to Clinton, a two-term president.
“It would be unfair to compare Obama to Clinton, or Reagan for that matter,” she said. “It’s not unfair to look at Obama’s numbers compared to Kennedy, Carter, or Ford.”
According to de Rugy, Obama’s job numbers are still considerably worse than Kennedy, Ford and Carter who saw 3.6 million, 2.1 million, and 10.3 million respectively. These three presidents served in office as long or shorter than Obama.
The private sector has added more than 4.5 million jobs over the last 30 months, including 532,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2010 and more than one million jobs saved due to the auto bailout, according to the Obama campaign, but the job growth has not been enough to offset the first 13 months of losses.
The unemployment rate in July rose to 8.3 percent from 8.2 percent the the previous month even though the economy added 163,000 jobs.
“While there is more work that remains to be done, today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression,” writes Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the president.
The economy would have to add about 280,000 jobs per month from now until January 2013 for Obama to no longer be ranked last for job creation.
“I was very surprised to hear that overall job creation was negative 300,000,” said de Rugy. “That was quite stunning.”
“I was really surprised because of everything you hear during this campaign. The president talks about how he has created between three and four million jobs,” she continued.
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