About Those 4.5 Million New Jobs, Mr. President

One of the most common things you’ll hear from the Obama campaign and its surrogates in response to the “Are You Better Off?” question is the assertion that, since the President has taken office, 4.5 million new private sector jobs have been created. Now, as I’ve mentioned before, while it’s great that all those people have jobs now, that’s not entirely impressive given the number of people who now qualify as “long term unemployed” and who have simply given up looking for a job. Add into that the fact that monthly average job growth has been barely keeping up with population growth. Indeed, if you take that 4.5 million number and divide it by the 42 full months Obama has been President (starting in February 2009), that’s an average of just over 100,000 new jobs per month, which most employment analysts would consider a disappointing jobs report. If you divide it by the 29 months that Obama’s campaign frequently cites, that puts us about 155,000 new jobs per month on average, which is barely above the level needed to keep up with population.
But wait, there’s more:

[A]n accurate description of the growth of private-sector jobs since January 2010, when the long, steep slide in employment finally hit bottom. But while a total of 4.5 million jobs sounds great, it’s not the whole picture.
Nonfarm private payrolls hit a post-recession low of 106.8 million that month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The figure currently stands at 111.3 million as of July.
While that is indeed a gain of 4.5 million, it’s only a net gain of 300,000 over the course of the Obama administration to date. The private jobs figure stood at 111 million in January 2009, the month Obama took office.
And total nonfarm payrolls, including government workers, are down from 133.6 million workers at the beginning of 2009 to 133.2 million in July 2012. There’s been a net loss of nearly 1 million public-sector jobs since Obama took office, despite a surge in temporary hiring for the 2010 census.

Read more: http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/about-those-4-5-million-new-jobs-mr-president/