Our Economy Is Not Doing Great - Stop Saying It Is

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20. The presidential jobs table

# Job Creation of record of post-WWII Presidents, Average Annual % Increases. -- Sorted from best to worst by average annual percentage increase in jobs. Republicans in red, Democrats in blue. Notice that -- with the tiny exception (0.02% difference) of Nixon to Kennedy -- the worst Democrat has a better record than the best Republican -- that is, until Obama, who inherited an economy that was losing several hundred thousand jobs a month.

Also, Kennedy did not have a chance to complete his term -- had he done so, and had he had the same job creation numbers in December 1963 through January 1965 as Johnson had (a 3.48%/year annualized rate of increase), he would have easily topped Nixon.

(updated 2/7/20 after new jobs report released - it has revisions going back decades. Unfortunately, Ford edges out Obama on average annual percentage job increase by 0.01% (1.09% to 1.08%)




Remember, Obama inherited the deepest recession since World War II, which lost 4.2 million jobs in the last 10 months of his predecessor, and in the last 3 months of his predecessor was losing 753,000 jobs a month. With that momentum, job losses continued for the first 13 months of the Obama presidency -- through February 2010 -- totalling 4.3 million jobs lost during those 13 months.

Anyway, despite the 4.3 million jobs lost in his first 13 months because of the Bush crash, Obama still beats 3 of the last 6 post-WWII Republican presidents with completed terms.

In the above table, the average annual % increase in jobs (the last column) is a much fairer way to compare presidents than just the raw job creation figures in thousands because the latter is unfair to the earlier presidents who were working with much smaller labor forces to begin with. For example the number of job holders at the beginning of Truman's administration was only 38% as many as at the beginning of Clinton's administration, and 31% as many as at the beginning of G.W. Bush's administration. So Truman's pathetic-looking 93,570 jobs/month creation record turns out to be even better than Clinton's 238,521 jobs/month record when adjusted for the size of the labor force at the beginning of their terms.

In raw thousands of jobs created per year, both Reagan and Nixon beat Truman. But when adjusted for the size of the labor force -- again, by looking at average annual percentage increases in jobs -- Truman beats them both.

Official sources of information for the above:

# Payroll Jobs: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001
# Monthly change of above: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth
# . . Hint: to see both of the above two together on the same page, go to http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001 and click on the "More Formatting Options" link in the upper right and check the "Original Data Value" and the "1-Month Net Change" checkboxes and click the "Retrieve Data" button halfway down the page on the left
# Private Sector Payroll Employment: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001
# Monthly change of above: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001?output_view=net_1mth