Krugman on Jobs
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Romney has critiqued Obama for being ‘”a “job killer” who is “in over his head”’; and one quote (which I can not source at the moment) has him claiming to have created more jobs as Governor of Mass. than Obama has done for the country.
It turns out, according to Paul Krugman, that this is bullshit. The figures are illustrative enough to be reproduced here. While they’re somewhat self explanatory, I’m going to bore you with some explanation. The first two measure total employment. The one on the left covers 2007 – 2012, the right 1999-2004.
The best figure to illustrate these data is that which has been released by the Obama campaign itself. The reason I prefer the data to be illustrated in this manner is that it makes two features blunt: the difference between job losses as opposed to job gains, and the arc of the trend. From a campaign perspective, this figure makes for a better narrative: Obama took over in the midst of a bad economic downturn, and while he didn’t turn it around during his first 100 hours in office, things did begin to improve in that the rate of decline was arrested.
And neither include today’s report that 200K jobs were created in December.
