On Friday, Obama inserted his foot firmly into his mouth, and gave the Romney folks a beautiful soundbite, by saying that the private sector was doing fine. But take a look at private sector employment from 2004 to now:
As you can see, private sector employment bottomed out in the beginning of 2010 and has since been growing at the same rate as it did before the crash. It has been at pre-crash trend for nearly two and a half years now. That’s not bad. It isn’t good either, though. Ideally, what we would like to see is above-trend growth rates to return us to full employment. But now take a look at the public sector, including all levels of government, over the same time period:
This, obviously, is what not “doing fine” looks like. And that’s what Obama meant. The private sector is growing steadily (although much less rapidly than we’d like) while public sector job losses partially offset the private gains. Without the losses in the public sector forced through by austerity measures and squeezed revenues, our unemployment situation would be looking much better than it does now. And contra Romney, those jobs are real jobs held by real people who spend their money at real businesses. There simply is no means by which laying off 600,000 people improves the economy, especially when the damage at the state and local level is largely due to depressed tax revenue from people not having jobs.
520 Chestnut 
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