Obama Is The Dr. Kevorkian Of Job Creation

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Leadership: So abysmal is the president's job-creation record that, according to a new study, he'd have to create 280,000 every month just to get out of the cellar among modern presidents. Where are the jobs?

Presidents actually don't create jobs, but their policies and programs can stand in the way of those who do. According to a chart produced using figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and compiled by the good folks at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, President Obama has made even former President Jimmy Carter look like Adam Smith.

The chart shows the total job growth during the tenure of each president since 1945 and the ending unemployment rate. Listed first is Bill Clinton, credited with creating 22.6 million jobs during his two terms, a time when Republicans took control of the House for the first time in four decades, helping to balance four budgets and passing welfare reform.

Listed second is Ronald Reagan, credited with creating 16.1 million jobs. After inheriting a genuine mess from Jimmy Carter that included inflation raging at 12.5%, policies like across-the-board tax cuts and oil-price deregulation, and policies that helped create the "dot-com" tech boom that fed Clinton's numbers, inflation was a paltry 4.4% when he left.

Under Carter, poverty and unemployment were rising, incomes were falling, productivity was stagnant, and economic growth had ceased. Reagan not only reversed the malaise of Jimmy Carter but fueled an economic boom that lasted 92 months without recession. Unemployment sank from 7.1% to 5.5%, and the prime interest rate eased from 15.3% to 9.3%.

During this boom, the economy grew by one-third and tax receipts doubled as we added the equivalent of the West German economy to our own.

Trailing Clinton and Reagan in the rankings are Presidents Johnson, Carter, Nixon, Truman, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Bush 41, and Ford and Bush 43. Dead last and the only president in negative territory is Barack Obama. Even Gerald Ford in his short, post-Watergate term created a net 2.1 million new jobs. Obama is listed at a minus 318,000.

The Mercatus analysis acknowledges differences in term length and "that population grows and labor participation varies over time." But it notes Obama's numbers are appalling even though the data are "probably slightly biased in (his favor) for both the job numbers and unemployment rate."

As Mercatus analyst Veronique de Rugy notes in explaining the chart, the current so-called recovery is the slowest of all time, and 280,000 jobs would need to be created each month to get President Obama out of last place among post-World War II presidents and into positive territory.

President Obama says he inherited a mess from President George W. Bush. So did Reagan. But when the ship of state was taking on water, Reagan trimmed the sails, patched the holes and went on to build a bigger boat. President Obama's program was to drill more holes to let the water out.

He would raise taxes, burden us with costly job-destroying regulations and "invest" in green energy failures like Solyndra while keeping plentiful fossil fuel resources in the ground. He would fundamentally transform Reagan's shining city on the hill into a shantytown.

The mess President Obama inherited was in a very real sense a mess of his own making, since as a community organizer working with and for groups like Acorn he pushed the Community Reinvestment Act, which led to lending money under government duress to people who couldn't pay it back. The market collapse was straight out of the Cloward and Piven/Saul Alinsky playbook.

The next job President Obama causes to be lost should be his.

 

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