Those who write about this presidential campaign are right to focus a great deal of attention on Donald Trump—his absolute lack of fitness for the office he seeks, his race baiting, the huge giveaway to millionaires and billionaires in his tax proposals, as well as his corruption, both in business and in his political donations. But this post isn’t going to be primarily about Trump. It’s about jobs.
Ronald Reagan’s policies were awful, but he understood what made voters tick. How do voters measure the economic record of a president? Jobs. That’s what Reagan captured when he said: “Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.”
Barack Obama took office during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. This one (please scroll down) image—which includes the most recent week’s data—captures the jobs recovery we’ve experienced (yes, I also noticed it should read ‘fewer’ as opposed to ‘less’ filings, a tragic missed opportunity for alliteration in addition to an unforgivable grammatical error).
The white line measures first-time unemployment claims—people getting fired. It peaks at over 650,000 per week, just after Obama took office. Notice the steady drop since. The number of people filing new claims each week is hovering near a 40-year low. That’s even more impressive given that the total number of eligible workers has grown from about 140 million 40 years ago to about 240 million today. The blue line represents the number of open jobs at any one time, a powerful measure of economic opportunity. It bottomed out at barely 2 million in early 2009, and has risen sharply and steadily—tripling to 6 million now. What have the last eight years shown? Democratic policies create jobs.
As for the more simple number of jobs created, the progress under the current administration is equally strong. Again, the low point occurred just as Obama took office, with the U.S. losing around 800,000 jobs per month. We hit positive job creation numbers a year later, and have had 78 consecutive months of job growth since. In case you’re wondering, yes, that is the longest such streak on record.
As for the unemployment rate, it has followed a similarly impressive pattern, as captured by Kyle Griffin, producer for Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show (please scroll down):
Check out this comment on the unemployment numbers from the White House’s Jesse Lee (please scroll down):
And it’s not just jobs. Although it’s taken longer, wage growth is firming up as well. Real wage growth, i.e., after inflation, has been running at or just above 2 percent for the past couple of years, thanks to low inflation and solid nominal growth. The paychecks of the American worker are going significantly farther than they were in the period just after the crash, early in President Obama’s term. In fact, this graph shows that the paycheck of the average worker—the technical term is “production and nonsupervisory employee”—now goes farther than at any point since—wait for it—the Carter Administration.
Let me add that, of course, things are not perfect. However, there is no question that the policies President Obama and a Democratic Congress implemented after the crash of 2008 turned our economy around, Trump’s lies notwithstanding. The truth is that virtually every economist asked in a University of Chicago survey agreed that the stimulus package—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009—had a real and positive impact. It helped mitigate the worst effects of the crash and put us on a course toward recovery.
We can see this even more directly by comparing our economy’s performance to that of our economic peers. Whereas Obama and the Democrats implemented significant stimulus measures shortly after taking office, European governments instead pursued a path of comparatively harsh austerity. Economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff—whose area of specialty is financial crises—ran the numbers and found that, since the crash, the U.S. economy has experienced a stronger recovery than that of virtually any other wealthy, industrialized country. Furthermore, it has recovered more quickly than normal compared to what has happened in the past after such a crash.
Hillary Clinton largely shares Obama’s progressive economic philosophy, and will maintain and/or build on his policies. Her opponent’s tax plans make George W. Bush—whose policies gave us negative private sector job growth during his eight-year presidency—look like Karl Marx (try to picture Dubya with that hair and beard if you ever need a good laugh).
The choice is clear: Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton know how to create jobs. As for the other side? Forget reality TV. Trump’s economic plans would lead to millions of Americans getting fired.
