There are a lot of ways to measure job growth in America, some more accurate than others. Organizing for America (the political arm of the Democratic National Committee) created a chart to “celebrate” the first anniversary of President Barack Obama’s Failed Stimulus. Their chart attempted to cover up the fact that President Obama’s stimulus was a giant failure and came up 9 million jobs short of the number of jobs he promised to create by 2010.
Well, Matthias Shapiro of 10000Pennies video fame created his own jobs graph showing just how great Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) economic stewardship has been for the American people. It shows how jobs have plummetted under her leadership:
There are a couple of things we at Heritage would have done differently if we had created the above graphic (for example, Matthias uses the Labor Department’s Table A-1 seasonally adjusted total employed number for his benchmark, while Heritage uses the Table B-1 seasonally adjusted total nonfarm payroll number for our benchmark), but it still does a great job countering the Organizing for America graph below:
When holding the Obama administration accountable for their $862 billion stimulus, the key is to remember what the White House promised to deliver when they were selling the plan to the American people, and then compare that to what the objective results have been.
When the Obama administration first unveiled their stimulus plan in November 2008, they claimed it would create 2.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. At the time, BLS reported that the U.S. economy had about 136.1 million jobs. But by January 2009, 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. Putting these numbers together, we can create an objective standard to judge both the President and his stimulus by: 136.1 million plus 2.5 million equals 138.6 million, and 134.6 million plus 4 million equals 138.6 million. So the objective, Obama-administration-created, BLS-data-verifiable, jobs-accountability number is 138.6 million.
According to the most recent BLS jobs report, the U.S. economy currently employs 129.5 million people, thus leaving President Obama’s failed stimulus 9 million jobs short of what was promised to the American people. This is the true picture of his stimulus: