April 18, 2020: Donald Trump Never Inherited a Mess - Barack Obama Did

 

4/18/20: This seems like a good time to take a look at a jobs chart from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here, we go back twenty years, and include the start of 2020, to illustrate several points.

 

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An absolute miracle of math! Candidate Trump claims, under President Obama, that 93 million Americans are out of work. Trump takes over in January 2017. A month later, they almost all have jobs.

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Let’s start with 2000. In November, when George W. Bush won a first term as president, the unemployment rate stood at 3.9% percent. By September 2001, when we were attacked, the rate had risen to 5.0%. It shot up after the attack. Few experts, if any, blamed President Bush for the spike. 

It fell again over the next few years. When the housing bubble burst in 2008, the jobless numbers ballooned to 8.3% in January 2009. 

That was when Barack Obama took over. So, let’s get this much straight: President Obama inherited a mess.

 

Consider the number of jobs added monthly, since January 2000. Below, we total up jobs added to the U.S. economy annually: 

2000:   1,937,000                                        

2001:   1,727,000 (loss)                              

2002:      416,000 (loss)                              

2003:      112,000                                         

2004:   2,036,000                                        

2005:   2,525,000                                        

2006:   2,100,000                                        

2007:   1,143,000                                        

2008:   3,553,000 (a)                                   

2009:   5,051,000                                        

2010:   1,034,000 (b)

2011:   2,074,000

2012:   2,176,000

2013:   2,301,000

2014:   3,004,000

2015:   2,720,000

2016:   2,345,000 (c)

2017:   2,139,000 (d)

2018:   2,314,000

2019:   2,133,000 (e)

 

(a) You can see Barack Obama inherited a mess. Job losses were terrible and accelerating when he took over in January 2009. 

(b) Starting in October 2010, job growth begins. For the next 76 months growth continues. 

(c) Candidate Trump will insist during his run for office, that the job numbers under his predecessor are “phony”  and “rigged.” He will claim that 93 million Americans are out of work. He will variously state that the real unemployment rate is 18% or 35% or 29% or 42%. 

(Trump has never been particularly good with facts.)

 

(d) An absolute miracle of math! When the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that unemployment has fallen from 4.7% in January 2017 to 4.6% in February, Trump’s first press secretary, Sean Spicer, says the numbers might have been rigged before. Now the figures are real. There were 93,000,000 Americans looking for work the month before.

The economy added 188,000 jobs. 

Poof. 

Just like that, almost all of the 92,812,000 Americans looking for work disappear!

 

(e) Fun fact: In Barack Obama’s last seven years in office, after we dug out of the Great Recession, 15,654,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy (2011-2016). That would average out to 186,357 per month. 

In President Trump’s first 38 months in the Oval Office a total of 7,075,000 jobs were added, for an average of 186,184.