The Obama re-election campaign has produced another ad touting the president’s “successful” economic record of accomplishment. Critics will likely argue, however, that like his last campaign ad, this new one might get “three Pinocchio’s” from the Washington Post as well.
The new ad boasts of the upward trend on private sector job growth over the past 22 months, and “squarely places blame for the millions lost before Obama took office on former President George W. Bush,” writes Devin Dwyer of ABC News.
“Faced with a deep recession,” the narrator says, as a downward red arrow highlights “Job Loss During Bush Administration” on a labor department graph, “President Obama moved quickly to help our economy recover.”
And while ABC News says that the the job creation claims made in the ad are true, writers at Zero Hedge might disagree.
“The economy added 1.6 million jobs in 2011 after adding 940,000 in 2010, according to the Labor Department,” ABC News report. “The unemployment rate of 8.5 percent in December was the lowest level since March 2009.”
To that, Zero Hedge had this to say:
One does not need to be a rocket scientist to grasp the fudging the BLS has been doing every month for years now in order to bring the unemployment rate lower: the BLS constantly lowers the labor force participation rate as more and more people “drop out” of the labor force for one reason or another. While there is some floating speculation that this is due to early retirement, this is completely counterfactual when one also considers the overall rise in the general civilian non institutional population.
…we are redoing an analysis we did first back in August 2010, which shows what the real unemployment rate would be using a realistic labor force participation rate. To get that we used the average rate since 1980, or ever since the great moderation began. As it happens, this long-term average is 65.8%.
We then apply this participation rate to the civilian noninstitutional population to get what an “implied” labor force number is, and additionally calculate the implied unemployed using this more realistic labor force. We then show the difference between the reported and implied unemployed.
Finally, we calculate the jobless rate using this new implied data.
It won’t surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% – basically where it has been ever since 2009 – and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.
The new campaign video is described as follows on its YouTube page:
After taking office, President Obama signed the Recovery Act to help get our economy back on track.
As a result:
-The U.S. has seen 22 consecutive months of private-sector job growth.
-The private sector added more than 3.1 million jobs over those 22 months,.
-Manufacturing added 334,000 jobs in the last two years, the first time since 1997 that manufacturing employment rose.
-The President passed legislation to create jobs and supporting working Americans, including:
-A payroll tax cut for all working families, providing the average working family with a $1,000 tax cut in 2011.
-Expansion of small business loan programs to help small business access credit and create jobs.
-Initiatives to help veterans transition to post-service careers.
-Tax incentives for businesses that hire unemployed veterans.
The President’s decision to provide emergency loans to the auto industry:
-Saved more than 1.4 million American jobs.
-Prevented personal income losses over two years of more than $96 billion.
-Helped make the big three (Chrysler, GM, and Ford) all profitable for the first time in years.