More on Net Jobs

In my last post, I argued with the Mercatus Center’s baseline for calculating Obama’s net jobs number. They used January 2009, but I think the starting month for the calculation should by February 2009 because Obama was inaugurated in late January, and thus February was the first full month of his term. I also used the “Romney metric” where the net jobs number is calculated beginning one year after the beginning of a president’s term.

But, to be fair, Romney’s actual quote was that net jobs should be calculated beginning “six months to a year” from the start of the term. So in the interest of not cherry picking data, here’s a chart showing the impact of the month in which you start the net jobs calculation upon the result. It begins with January 2009 (the Mercatus benchmark) through to February 2010 (one year from the first full month, the combination of mine and Romney’s benchmark).

So you see that the only way to show that Obama has presided over a net decrease in jobs is to begin in January 2009, crediting the president with 20 days of job losses over which he did not preside. By even the stingiest of fair metrics, Obama’s net jobs number is positive.

And just for the hell of it, here’s what the jobs situation will look like if the current employment expansion of +150,000 jobs per month continues for the entirety of Obama’s (potential) second term:

 

So there’s way more charts than you cared to see. Cheers.

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