The 2012 presidential election has become one of the more polarizing in recent memory (right up there with 2004). What this election is most likely going to come down to is the economy. The choice is whether we keep on the same track of progress we’ve been making, or change direction. As anyone who follows me on Facebook knows, I’m pro-Obama. I’ve reconstituted this blog after four years--for only a couple of weeks--to lay out the case for why I'm pro-Obama.
I'm going to try to explain why I think he will be better for the economy over the next four years, and I’m going to lay out a pretty broad picture over several entries. First up: let's do some myth-busting on the economy.
Myth 1 – Barack Obama caused the recession and is solely responsible for the economy.
The Truth: the economy went into recession in December of 2007, and the bottom fell out in September of 2008. Beginning in April of 2007, the U6 unemployment rate—which some will argue is one of the better measures of the state of employment and jobs in the economy—began rising from 8.0% in March of 2007 to 14.2 at the end of January of 2009, which is when Obama was sworn in. That was 22 months of that rate increasing, and that was all BEFORE OBAMA WAS PRESIDENT. The private sector lost 4.038 MILLION jobs during that stretch.
President Obama took office right in the midst of this horrible stretch.
Myth 2 – Barack Obama’s stimulus “failed,” and the economy is not recovering under Barack Obama’s leadership.
The Truth: Inheriting the downward trends outlined above, Obama enacted policies that put the brakes on that recession. His stimulus bill passed in the spring of 2009, and, “The truth is that the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million people, compared with what employment would have been otherwise.“ (source)
Job losses steadily decreased (more on this tomorrow) until February 2010, and from that point on, the economy has done nothing but grow jobs. 4.256 million TOTAL jobs have been added to the economy since February of 2010. And, incredibly, 4.726 million PRIVATE SECTOR jobs have been created in that period. (source)
Wait, there are more private sector jobs than total jobs? What?? This leads us to...
Myth 3 – Barack Obama has grown the size of government.
The Truth: Again using the BLS website, we see that government jobs under Obama have DECREASED by 575,000 throughout his entire first term.
Myth 4 – Barack Obama DOUBLED the budget deficit in his first year.
The Truth: the widely-accepted notion that Obama doubled the deficit is not correct, and based on a false attribution that Bush’s fiscal-year-2009 budget is “Obama’s spending”. On Jan. 8, 2009, the C.B.O. projected a deficit for the year of $1.3 trillion that didn’t include any Obama policies (source).
The budget deficit has hovered slightly above or slightly below that number in subsequent years. The budget Obama submitted in February of this year for fiscal year 2013 requested just $900 billion in deficit spending. Federal spending has grown more slowly under Obama than under any president since Eisenhower. (source)
Those are four pretty big myths busted, no? To my eyes, it appears that Barack Obama inherited a shit-storm of an economy, put the brakes on a huge slide, and he turned the ship around and got it moving in the right direction. And it has continued moving in a positive direction for almost three full years.
Stay tuned for tomorrow's Part 2: On Trajectories and Private Sector Jobs
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