In the second Presidential debate, Romoney tried once again to claim that American jobs were declining under the Obama administration.
The Republican spin and deception on this issue is astonishing....but quite predictable too. Check out this chart below from The Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis and ask yourself if this looks like a downward trend in job numbers to YOU?
For reasons that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with partisan election politics, Romoney and the rightwingnut media echo chamber would claim that this chart does show a job loss under Obama.
So is Romoney right about job numbers declining since Obama took office??? Or is the context of what had been happening to the economy under Bush before Obama took office somehow important to consider if you want to actually understand the situation and not just score bogus political points???
Remember Obama came into office with the economy in the tank, the banking system and the auto industry about to collapse, and unemployment already skyrocketing* after eight years of Bush Admin. mismanagement that had taken the country from a $230 billion dollar surplus when Clinton left office to a $1.3 trillion dollar deficit when Bush left office. It takes a while to turn the economy around and recover after a train wreck like Bush left behind but quite obviously progress is being made on recovery. If the corrupt republican greed freaks and plutocratic power trippers get back into control, expect to see this chart in the coming years look even worse than it looks here in 2009. The ride will be a lot rougher than the Bush years. If Romoney and Lyin' Ryan win, expect to see more wars in the Mideast, huge gas price hikes, more tax cuts for the super rich and the corporations, higher taxes for the middle class and even the poor, more profitable (for them) destruction of the economy and exporting of jobs, a ban on legal abortion and suppression of the availability of contraception supplies and information, more assaults on everyone's freedoms and rights, more packing the judiciary with far right wing ideologues which means more twisting of the laws to favor the top 1% at the expense of the rest of us. Give Obama a chance and the recovery seen here will continue and grow stronger. Let's give him a majority in the House and a 60 plus majority in the Senate while we're at it and the things we need to happen to grow our economy and compete in the global market can get done without all of the organized Republican obstructionism that we've all seen for the last four years. The right wing has shown a willingness to see the country go down the tubes rather than let Obama accomplish anything. In spite of that, he's accomplished quite a lot.
* "unemployment already skyrocketing" - FactCheck.org reports this:
Repeated Job Loss Claim - Romney's claim that Obama "stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history" is also wrong, as we've noted before. The truth is more jobs were lost under Bush than Obama, and most of the jobs lost since he took office have now been regained. Since we wrote about this last year, the BLS has revised its statistics slightly for improved accuracy, as it does every year. The latest data show that "total nonfarm employment" (the standard measure of jobs) declined by nearly 8.8 million between its most recent peak in January 2008 and when the job slump bottomed out more than two years later, in February 2010. Of those lost jobs, nearly 4.5 million disappeared while Bush was president, and just over 4.3 million vanished during Obama's first 13 months in office. And since the job totals hit bottom there have been slow and steady gains, totaling nearly 3.6 million jobs. The total for March (released April 6) stood just 740,000 short of where it was in January 2009 when Obama was inaugurated.
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