Job Growth — What Job Growth?

For the first time, the unemployment rate has dropped below 8 percent under Obama, but that is no victory to crow about. 7.8 percent unemployment is still unacceptable.  Remember, President Obama promised that with his stimulus, the unemployment rate would be about 5.5 percent at this time. 

President Obama’s failed policies have led us down this road of high unemployment, where 23 million people are still out of work. Most of last month’s job “growth” comes from people resorting to part-time work. That’s one reason why the underemployment rate did not drop and instead remains stagnant at 14.7 percent.

Labor force participation is still way down. James Pethokoukis reports, “If the labor force participation rate was the same as when President Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 10.7%. If the participation rate had just stayed steady since the start of the year, the unemployment rate would be 8.4% vs. 8.3%.”

People have simply given up hope and stopped looking for jobs. Last month, 114,000 jobs were created but 211,000 people left the work force. That’s almost 2 people out of work for every person hired.

Though liberals may rejoice at being under the psychological barrier of “8 percent,” no president has won reelection with unemployment above 7.2 percent since the Great Depression, and the economy is still in shambles. The Associated Press has called this “the feeblest economic recovery since the Great Depression.” Forty months since the recession officially ended, we are still 4.5 million jobs in the hole from before the recession. That means this is officially the slowest recovery since World War II, and we aren’t even close to being done.

Another significant data point that was not widely reported on last week by the mainstream media was the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) number. The GDP was revised downward from 1.7 to 1.3 percent in the second quarter, which is even more evidence that the Obama economy is floundering.

People are still hurting out there, like the Americans featured in our film “The Hope and The Change,” who have seen their lives change dramatically for the worse after supporting President Obama. Even Vice President Biden admits the middle class has been buried for the last four years. They are struggling the same today as they were yesterday, and the new jobs number does not change anything.