The White Owl

Tuesday, June 09, 2009
The Obama Jobs Gap
By Heritage Foundation

Last Friday the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly job report showing that the economy lost 345,000 jobs in May. This brings the total number of jobs lost in the first full three months since the economic stimulus package was passed to 1.5 million jobs. Countering these inconvenient truths, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden unveiled a new “accelerated” “roadmap to recovery”, which the AP dryly notes “is neither new nor accelerated.” Officially, the Obama administration claims their stimulus plan has already “saved or created” 150,000 jobs, but even that number is fuzzy: This Sunday on CNN, Obama adviser David Axelrod claimed the stimulus “has produced hundreds of thousands of jobs.”



Even Democrats are beginning to question the integrity of the Obama administration’s economic claims. Grilling Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) said:

You created a situation where you cannot be wrong. If the economy loses 2 million jobs over the next few years, you can say yes, but it would’ve lost 5.5 million jobs. If we create a million jobs, you can say, well, it would have lost 2.5 million jobs. You’ve given yourself complete leverage where you cannot be wrong, because you can take any scenario and make yourself look correct.

Baucus is right. Continuing to play the Obama administration’s “saved or created” jobs game is a fool’s errand. They will always just re-tweak their formulas to come up with fake numbers to justify their policies. So can Americans find an objective metric to cut through the mendacity of the Obama administration’s “saved or created” jobs mantra?

Yes we can. By matching the Obama administration’s past promises to past BLS data, a clear jobs baseline emerges. When the Obama administration first unveiled the stimulus plan in November they claimed it would create 2.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. At the time BLS reported that U.S. economy employed about 136.1 million jobs. But by January that number fell to 134.6 million jobs. Not so coincidentally, the Obama administration upped the job creating magic of the stimulus to 4 million jobs by the end of 2010.

Is there a commonality between these two sets of numbers? There sure is: 136.1 million plus 2.5 million equals 138.6 million; and 134.6 million plus 4 million equals 138.6 million. Voila: the objective, Obama administration created, BLS data verifiable, jobs accountability number is 138.6 million.

So how is the Obama administration doing do far? According to the BLS the U.S. economy currently employs 132.2 million people. In order for President Obama to meet his promise to the American people, between now and the end of 2010, the U.S. economy will have to create 6.4 million jobs. The President had better get busy.


Citing the Supreme Court case that rejected President Harry Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills, Indiana state pension and construction fund representatives won a temporary injunction blocking the Obama administration brokered sale of Chrysler to Fiat.

Following the Obama administration’s lead, cities and states are handing out financial support to prominent businesses including cash, tax forgiveness, loans, loan guarantees and other types of aid.

According to Rasmussen Reports, only 42% of those who currently own a General Motors car are even somewhat likely to buy a GM product for their next car.

Almost half of the nation’s 20 largest union pension funds are so underfunded that federal law classifies them as “endangered” or in “critical” condition.

According to a Politico analysis, President Barack Obama invokes Jesus more than George W. Bush did.