Bogus ‘Mitt Math’ net jobs argument fails

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Willard "Mittens" Romney has been using a double-standard throughout his campaign.

For President Obama, Romney insists that every job lost since January 20, 2009 is Obama's fault, despite the fact that the earliest Obama's policies took effect were in March 2009, and economists treat jobs as a lagging indicator, using the fiscal year budget which begins October 1.

For himself, however, Romney adopts a much more lenient standard: Americans "ought to give, whichever president is going to be elected, at least six months or a year to get those policies in place." If the first six months don't count…

Romney has been using this "Mitt Math" net jobs argument to argue that President Obama "hasn't created one single net new job since he's been president." Aside from the fact that this undercuts Romney's argument that the government doesn't create jobs, only the private sector "job creators" do, his "Mitt Math" was wrong a number of weeks ago, as Steve Benen wrote. The misguided argument over 'net' jobs:

The only way Team Romney's talking point makes sense is if you include job losses that happened immediately after Obama became president — an argument Romney himself once dismissed as "silly" — and include public-sector job losses that Republicans say they support.

What's more, if we're only measuring employment by total non-farm payrolls, we're already above where we were in January 2009.

As of last week, the "Mitt Math" net jobs argument is officially, finally laid to rest. The 386,000 jobs we didn't know about:

And what did the BLS revision show? That over the last 12 months, the economy added 386,000 jobs that up until now had not been reported. That may not sound like much, but it's a 20 percent jump over the 1.94 million jobs thought to have been created overall over that same period.

Also note, this is a net total: the private sector created 453,000 additional jobs, while Republican austerity measures forced the public sector to shed an additional 67,000 jobs.

As a political matter, Pat Garofalo notes another salient angle: even if the early 2009 job losses are held against President Obama, he's now broken into positive territory for his first term. It also means more jobs were created in Obama's first four years than during George W. Bush's first four years — and Bush didn't inherit a global economic catastrophe [only a short recession.]

The September jobs report will be released on Friday. While the numbers are likely to be modest at best, the numbers will still be in positive territory. We are not bleeding jobs and we are not in a double-dip recession. Obama will extend his jobs creation record over George W. Bush's first term.