President Obama thoroughly flubbed the “Are you better off than you were four years ago test” during last night’s opening debate with Mitt Romney.
“Over the last 30 months, we’ve seen 5 million jobs in the private sector created,” Obama said, ignoring the persistent 8 percent plus unemployment rates that have been the characteristic of his presidency. “But we all know that we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
The only problem is that the number doesn’t represent the average job growth rate of the entire Obama presidency, and if Jan. 20, 2009 is used as the benchmark for job creation Obama actually lost jobs.
Job growth has averaged .84 percent annually, which is far below even Jimmy Carter’s 2.3 percent job growth, according to Yahoo! News.
Early last month the president said much the same during an interview with a Colorado local TV station, which was the same thing he said in interviews with CBS in Aug. 2010 and Oct. 2011.
Even President Reagan had worse unemployment than Obama during his first term and was able to turn things around. Under Reagan, unemployment rocketed up to 10.9 percent, yet by Nov. 1984 it had fallen to 7.4 percent, below where unemployment was when Obama took office.
Bill Clinton’s first term when unemployment had 7.3 percent unemployment when he took office in Jan. 1993. Yet four years later unemployment was at 5.3 percent when he started his second term.
It’s clear that the “Give me four more years, so I can use the same strategies that haven’t worked to reduce unemployment to pre-recession levels” hasn’t worked.
