All Together Now: Obama’s Net Jobs Number Is Not Negative

It’s most certainly not good, but it is not a net job loss.

The Mercatus Center released this chart, showing the number of jobs gained during multiple Presidents’ time in office. It’s meant to make Obama look bad, because he’s on the bottom and because his number is negative. OK, got it. But I’d like to quibble with the methodology:

The estimated job changes take into account the year-to-year changes in employment, typically from January to January

Looking at the BLS data (click here, select “total nonfarm” under the “seasonally adjusted” column, then scroll to the bottom and click “retrieve data” to get the numbers Mercatus used, note that they are in thousands), you can see that the number presented for Obama (316 thousand jobs lost) was calculated by subtracting the number for January 2009 from July 2012: 

133,245 – 133,561 = – 316 

So 316 thousand jobs were lost.

But Obama became President on January 20, 2009. If you repeat the calculation, except using the number for February 2009 (the first full month of his term) in place of January 2009, you come up with: 

133,245 – 132,837 = 408 

So 408 thousand jobs were gained.

It’s a small difference, about three quarters of a million jobs, but its the difference between a net positive and a net negative. Rhetorically, the difference is tremendous. Note too that Mitt Romney has previously claimed that a President should not be held responsible for the jobs situation during his first year in office, because his policies have yet to take effect. Using that metric, we find that Obama has overseen jobs grow by four million, which would put him just above JFK on the Mercatus chart. 

Matt Yglesias also notes that the economy has, for the past 18 months, been adding 150 thousand jobs per month. If Obama is re-elected and the pace of jobs growth remains the same as it has been recently, he will finish his 8 years in office with a gain of 7.8 million jobs. If you combine that number with the Romney method of omitting the first year, that would put Obama up to 11.8 million, just below LBJ and 4th on the chart. 

To put it more bluntly, if you believe that “Obama’s economic policies have failed” and assume that if he is re-elected we will continue to follow Obama’s economic policies, then he’ll wind up somewhere in the middle of the chart. Not good, but not exactly the coming armageddon the republicans would have you believe it is. 

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