Phony Data on Jobs and the Obama Administration

It’s sometimes said that presidents don’t control the economic weather but rather it controls them. We have reached the moment, however, when magical powers are going to be attributed to the presidency, and the current incumbent, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, will be charged with incompetence in using them. One manifestation of this thinking is the Romney campaign’s recent claim that women have suffered more than 90 percent of the jobs lost since Obama became president, a blatant attempt to undermine his lead among women voters. This claim involves two distortions; and most of the mainstream media have caught what I view as the smaller one—namely, that the claim ignores the full history of the recession and the huge job losses borne by men when George Bush was president.

The larger distortion has generally gone unnoticed, indeed, it has been mostly accepted. According to it, some 740 thousand jobs have been lost on Obama’s watch. This claim is another expression of the Republican mantra about a “failed” presidency.  And it involves some statistical crafting to fit the data to the argument, manipulating data in a way that we are likely to see a lot more of as the campaign proceeds, especially given the huge amounts of money available to hire “researchers” to come up with “facts.”

The Romney campaign arrives at the estimate by attributing to Obama all of the job losses since February 1, 2009, even though he had barely taken office at that point and there was not enough time for any of the new administration’s policies to have an impact. To understand how much timing matters in this case, recall that Obama entered the White House when the labor market was already in a swoon, and the number of jobs lost that February was more than 700 thousand, on a par with the losses for the final months of Bush’s second term. If we tally the jobs record of the current administration from March 1 instead of February 1, then the jobs deficit under Obama shrinks dramatically to 16,000 and, with any luck, will be erased in coming months.

This dependence of any jobs statistics to the choice of a starting point obviously leaves the question of how best to characterize the Obama administration’s record, which has been challenged not just from Republican ranks but also from the left, by Paul Krugman and Noam Scheiber (in his book, The Escape Artists: How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery), among others. There can be no doubt (see chart below) that the job market has been largely stagnant since the end of the Clinton years, except for the run-up that started in late 2003, fueled at least partly by the bubble that collapsed with the onset of the deep recession in December, 2007. Today, the total number of jobs in the U.S. economy is a mere 350 thousand higher than it was in February, 2001, when George W. Bush assumed office.

It’s not my place to assess the economic policies pursued by these two administrations and their role in this stagnation, and in the event, I lack the competence for such a task. Rather, in light of the consistent Republican charges of a “failed” President, especially because of high unemployment, I am looking for an empirical standard by which to assess labor-market changes while Obama has been President. The record under George W. Bush is an obvious reference point, since both presidents have had to face similar structural forces determining their economic weather, such as the growing impacts of globalization and computer-driven automation on the labor market, exemplified by accelerated off-shoring of jobs and the emergence of manufacturing jobs that cannot be filled because they require technical skills possessed by few in the U.S. workforce. Moreover, like Mitt Romney, George Bush is a Harvard MBA who worked in the private sector before entering politics and depended on tax cuts tilted toward the affluent to stimulate the economy.

There is also the issue of how to temporally calibrate the comparison, especially because the early months of the Obama presidency were affected by the precipitous economic slide that he was not responsible for. Starting the comparison therefore with the end of the recession, designated as June, 2009, by the official arbiter of economic cycles, the National Bureau of Economic Research, seems appropriate. The much shallower recession that took place during Bush’s first year gives us an equivalent starting point for him.

This calibrated comparison clearly turns out in favor of Obama. As the chart shows, some 2.3 million jobs have been created since the end of the most recent recession, while in the equivalent period after the end of the earlier one, about 700 thousand jobs were added to payrolls. There is, as noted, still a jobs deficit for the entire period Obama has been president, but that was also true for George W. Bush throughout his first term. In fact, the jobs market was still in negative territory when his second term began.

So, when the mantra of the “failed” presidency starts humming, and Mitt Romney characterizes Obama as one of the most “ineffective” presidents of all time, be wary when jobs statistics are hauled out to support these charges. The “data” are likely to be phony, to have been contrived to match the claims. They shouldn’t be allowed to enter public discourse unchallenged.