Commentarama Saves or Creates 10 Billion Jobs!!!

Yep, we did that. . . and you can’t prove otherwise. You can thank us later. How did we get to that figure? The same way Obama got to his newly-revised claim that his stimulus binge created two million jobs: he made it up. But this week Obama earned his place in history for something his fake job-creation claims can't cover up: he gave us the first jobless decade!

If you haven't heard, Obama has found a new way to calculate the number of jobs his stimulus plan “saved or created.” Rather than trying to count actual jobs (his first plan) or trying to count fantasy jobs in non-existent districts (his second plan), Obama has struck upon the ingenious plan of counting any job that receives any money from the stimulus plan as being saved or created, because obviously those jobs wouldn’t have existed without that money. . . just like that kid at McDonalds owes his job to my $1.32.

But that’s not what put Obama in the record books this week -- no, it takes more than that to get into the liars record book. Instead, Obama has found himself in a different record book. With the loss of another 85,000 jobs last month, Obama has given us the first decade with no job growth.

Seriously.

Zero percent. Zip. Nada.

In every decade since the 1940s (and probably earlier), job growth in the United States has exceeded 20%. That means that there were at least 20% more jobs in the United States at the end of the decade than there were at the start of the decade. In the 1940s, there were actually 40% more. And over the past 70 years, the average growth was 27%.

But in the age of Obama, the 2000s, job growth was exactly 0%. That’s right, there were no more jobs in this country on January 1, 2010 than there were on January 1, 2000 (see the chart on the right).

This is the direct result of Obama’s policies “saving or creating” 6.7 million jobs into oblivion. High taxes, misplaced and wasteful spending, and threats of regulation that terrified employers into putting off hiring. . . no idea was too stupid to try.

Not coincidentally, economic output in the 2000s rose at the slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s. Middle-income households made less in 2009, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999. This was the first decade with a falling median income and the first decade where the net worth of American households declined.

Without Obama’s job destroying policies, job growth would have been around 10% for the decade, which would have just about covered the additional 28 million people added to the country during the decade (we went from 281 million in 2000 to 309 million this year). But Obama couldn't leave well enough alone. . . much less do the right things. So he set about destroying the jobs market.

And none of Obama’s false jobs claims can cover this fact because 17% of the population is out of work -- ironically, because more and more people are giving up looking for work, the official employment rate actually went down to the (still shockingly high) 10%. This is because people who have given up trying to find work don’t count against the unemployment rate. Indeed, the labor participation rate, i.e. the percentage of the work-eligible population that has work or is seeking work, is at an all time low.

So Obama can claim as many fake jobs as he wants, but fake people don’t vote -- except in Chicago. And with millions of Americans unable to find work and tens of millions more finding themselves poorer than they were ten years ago, Obama and the Democrats are in real trouble when voters ask themselves Ronald Reagan’s famous question.

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”