The Obama campaign, reeling from the unemployment numbers that simply will not go away, is trumpeting Obama’s “success” in the 2012 Democratic Party platform. The platform brags: “Since early 2010, the private sector has created 4.5 million jobs, and American manufacturing is growing for the first time since the 1990’s.” The platform also touts Barack Obama for his help with job creation: “Last September, President Obama put forward the American Jobs Act to provide an immediate boost to the economy and strengthen the recovery.”
Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the platform the DNC has created for the Obama campaign to stand on is a pile of bullcrap. It’s notable that Obama’s claim vis-à-vis the private sector of 4.5 million new jobs is based on the period starting in early 2010; 4.2 million were lost between his inauguration and early 2010. And between the beginning of February of this year and the end of May, private sector employment growth fell further every month, with only 82,000 in May.
Obama has claimed that state and local governments are doing poorly relative to the private sector. Nope. State government employment is down two percent, but private sector employment is twice as bad – down four percent. Meanwhile Obama’s favorite kind of jobs, federal government employees, increased four percent since the start of the recession.
Furthermore, the supposed 4.3 million new jobs during the economic “recovery” pale by comparison to other recoveries; that figure would mean 2.8% growth. The average gain from recoveries since 1970 is 8% and 11% after severe recessions. And Obama’s failure is even worse when you consider the fact that there are roughly 7.6 million more working age people than when the recession started.
As for the statement that American manufacturing is growing, 1.2 million manufacturing jobs have been lost since October 2008. Obama has championed an unequal trading relationship with China; for example, he let China double the rate of tariffs on GM’s large-engine cars, thus forcing GM to build its cars in China. Obama let China place a 30% tariff on American-made excavators, which forced Caterpillar to build new small crawler factories in China and give technology to its Chinese partner in order to access the Chinese market. And speaking of the period Obama wants to brag about, from April 2010 to July 2012 U.S. net exports in goods to China fell steadily due to the Chinese government keeping out made-in-America products. Since January 2010, net exports to China worsened by about $3 billion per month. That’s 30,000 middle-class manufacturing jobs that Obama outsourced to China each month.
Lastly, the American Jobs Act cost $447 billion, most of it “electronically created” by the Federal Reserve buying U.S. Treasury debt. Obama said the act would create 1.9 million new jobs. After spending $17.2 billion of the total $38.6 billion for Obama’s “clean technology” program, which was supposed to “create or save” 65,000 jobs, there were only 3,545 jobs, which amounted to $4,851,904.09 per “green job.” Based on that record, the 1.9 million new jobs Obama predicted would actually be 92,000 new jobs.
Obama’s record on jobs is abysmal, and no amount of Democratic obfuscation on the issue can obscure that fact.
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