***UPDATE: From an email: “Nolte’s Reagan-Obama job rate analysis is skewed in O’s favor because, since
Clinton, workforce dropouts are no longer included.”
Below, a commenter accurately notes, as well, that Reagan expanded the workforce and still lowered the unemployment rate. Obama, however, has seen the unemployment rate artificially drop due to a shrinking workforce. For instance, the unemployment rate dropped last month to 7.7%, but that’s likely due to 135,000 leaving the workforce.
It’s just fact that if the labor force was as large today as when Obama took office, we would be looking at an unemployment rate closer to 11%.
The great trick Obama’s media is playing right now is the manufacturing of a New Economic Normal that makes it possible to pretend Obama’s failed economic policies are not. This is done through reporting which purposely excludes any kind of historical context. What the media and White House count on is that we’ve either forgotten what a real economic recovery looks like, or that we’re too young to remember the Reagan Miracle.
In January of 1981, President Ronald Reagan inherited an economy every bit as awful as the one President Obama inherited in January of 2009. Before the Reagan Recovery hit, unemployment would peak at 10.8% in December of 1982 (Obama’s high was only 10% in October of 2009). Unlike Obama, though, Reagan also had to deal with crippling inflation and interest rates.
Obama certainly inherited some unique problems of his own. But there is no question that it’s fair to compare how both presidents handled their respective economic crises, and the results of the individual policies they instituted to get a desperate country out from under.
Reagan’s approach was to get government off the backs of the people. He slashed tax rates, cut regulations, and freed Americans to innovate. His wisest decision, though, was to increase the incentive to invest.
Obama did the exact opposite. He intentionally exploded the size of government, passed legislation with crippling regulations (Dodd-Frank, ObamaCare), and rather than freeing the American people to invest and incentivizing risk, Obama took money out of the private economy through tax increases and decided the government knew better with a “stimulus” of nearly a trillion dollars.
Today, if you look around the media, they’re pretending 236,000 new jobs created last month represents some kind of miracle, when the truth is that the number is at best mediocre. But the media have manufactured the ObamaCurve in order to give a failed president a passing grade. It’s only through the cynical removal of historical context that the media are able to celebrate economic failure.
At this same time in Reagan’s presidency (March of 1985), Reaganomics had decreased the unemployment rate from a high of 10.8% to 7.2%.
From a high of only 10%, Obamanomics has decreased unemployment to a still-high 7.7%.
The comparisons are just as startling when it comes to job creation.
In the last year, Obamanomics has created 1.97 million jobs, or a measly 164k per month.
During this same time in the Reagan presidency (March of 1984 to February of 1985), Reaganomics created 3.34 million jobs, an average of 278k per month.
The comparison between 1983 and 2011 is truly eye opening. Reaganomics created 3.45 million jobs, compared to Obamanomics’ 2.1 million.
We are currently living through a kind of Orwellian moment in which the media are turning failure and mediocrity into success through the deliberate memory-holing of history.
Fact: Had Obama swallowed his left-wing pride, looked to the recent past, and used the Reagan Miracle as a blueprint, our economy would be in much better shape today. But the media are so dishonest and so committed to putting Obama on Mt. Rushmore that millions upon millions of American are needlessly suffering.
The media’s ObamaCurve is nothing more than a hoax, a scam, a racket, a con, and The Big Lie. What could have been Morning In America is shaping up to be The Lost Decade.
And media’s lie of omission is that … it didn’t have to be this way.
NOTE: The numbers of above on the unemployment rate and job creation come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
UPDATE: Some changes were made after a triple-check of the math.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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