Governor Nice Guy and the Ohio Jobs Miracle

If you haven’t been paying attention you might not have noticed that Governor Kasich is baling sweet political hay, bragging about all the jobs he has brought to his state. The figure he cites (and what good conservative could doubt that a semi-conservative GOP governor was telling the truth) is 400,000.

So, good work Governor Nice Guy. (And, please, please, please, can you save the GOP from Donald Troll!)

It seemed to me, as an upstanding liberal, that if the Governor was allowed credit for creating jobs for Ohio, then the same kind of credit might be due President Barack Obama for his work across the United States. There aren’t “magic jobs,” I don’t think, created only by Republicans, whereas jobs created by Democrats don’t count. I think a job gained is a job gained is a job gained, as Gertrude Stein once opined.

For that reason—because I don’t believe in voodoo economics, I like to peruse the Labor Bureau statistics. Sometimes GOP types loves statistics. Sometimes GOP types insist the same statistics are bogus.

(Rule of thumb: all statistics that make President Obama look good, indicate Climate Change is real, or prove the Top 1% is rolling in dough, are unreal, false, mathematical impossibilities, and part of a nefarious communist plot.)

Here’s what we know for sure. 

Governor Kasich took office on January 10, 2011. We should not blame him for the state’s high unemployment rate on that day. In February 2011, less than a month after he took over, Ohio unemployment was 9.0%. By the end of the year Governor Nice had turned it around and cut unemployment to 8.0%.

How was President Obama doing during those same months? In February 2011 the national unemployment rate was also 9.0%. By the end of the year it had fallen to 8.5%. 

Advantage: Governor Nice. 

Well: The Ohio and U. S. economies chugged along, straining to make up for damage done when President Mission Accomplished watched Wall Street drive a great nation over a giant fiscal cliff.

Even in those difficult times, however, the jobs magic of Governor Nice continued. Here are his stellar numbers, my liberal brothers and sisters. By February 2016 state unemployment had been slashed.

Only 4.9% of Ohioans remained out of work. 

Morale of the story: When you really, really cherish job growth, and not comments about human genitalia, John Kasich is the man for the job.

Not Donald Troll! Definitely not Donald Troll!!

See column far right, fourth from top.

As for that sneaky Muslim in the White House, with plans to kill granny, steal all the guns, and evil enough to want to bring health care to twenty million Americans who lacked it, liberals must swallow the cruel facts and…

OH, HELL NO! my right-wing friends! WT-job-creating-F is happening here?

By February 2016, President Obama had caught up with Governor Nice. You read that right. The dark-skinned guy, born in Hawaii (which last time geographers looked was still an official state in our union) had cut the unemployment rate in Hawaii, Ohio and THE OTHER FORTY-EIGHT STATES to:

4.9%!

 

I understand how hard this might be for some. I realize how much conservatives want to believe the myth that President Obama wrecked the economy and is wrecking it still. I also know many five-year-olds believe the Easter Bunny is real.

The fundamental concept here is not difficult to grasp. If numbers are right where Mr. Kasich is concerned, the exact same kind of numbers are right where President Obama is concerned.

For the plain fun of it all, here are job-creation numbers for the last six years, since the slide into the Great Recession (which President Obama could in no way have caused unless he was proud possessor of some kind of Muslim time machine, which Rush Limbaugh may well soon insist is true) was halted and turned around:

2010: 1.06 million jobs added (the tide turned for good, with job gains every month, starting in October 2010.)

2011: 2.09 million jobs added.

Figures in box show monthly job gains in thousands.

2012: 1.8 million jobs added.

2013: 2.2 million jobs added for the year.

2014: 2.95 million jobs added (the best total since 1999 when President Lustful was chasing women around the White House).

2015: 2.65 million jobs added in twelve months.

Then as Forbes and other news outlets reported the U. S. economy added 151,000 jobs in January 2016.

Even Fox News had to admit another 242,000 jobs were added this past February. But Fox News was quick, in a fair-and-balanced right-wing kind of way, to ignore this alarming fact. Alarming to right-wingers, at least: That meant, under President Obama, once he halted the precipitous fall touched off when Mission Accomplished Bush still grasped the policy wheel, that we had had job growth for 65 straight months.

So that’s where we stand.And that, boys and girls, left, right, center and crazy, is what is commonly called:

MATH.

Obama Saves Capitalism! Right-Wing Haters Dismayed!

IMAGINE ON JANUARY 20, 2009, one half second before Barack Obama completed the oath of office to become president, that Dick Cheney pushed an innocent bystander off the top of the Empire State Building.

Could the GOP really argue that it would be Mr. Obama's fault when the victim splattered on the ground?

That's how dumb you have to be to buy the line Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are peddling:  that the president and the Democrats are responsible for all 23 million out-of-work Americans and the millions of families on food stamps. (It's odd to hear Romney mention these "moochers" and their "mooching" children. Aren't they part of the 47% he disdains? Let them go look in the dumpsters for stale donuts if they're hungry, right, because we can't raise taxes on billionaires! And once they have heart attacks in their apartments just load them into ambulances and rush the poor schmucks to the emergency room and then maybe we can save them. Ah, but who cares if we don't? They won't vote for you anyway, Mitt. Isn't that what you said?)

Really, who gets credit for all those millions of unemployed and the fact that the economy hasn't recovered?

The obvious comparison when it comes to unemployment would be President Ronald Reagan with President Obama. This isn't even hard to understand, right wing types. Sure, many of you think that Mitt Romney killed Osama bin Laden. But for this all you need to do is look at a simple graph.

Ten days before your hero, St. Ronald of Tampico, took office, in February 1981, the unemployment rate was 7.4%. You probably remember that the economy was in terrible shape and that you blamed it on Jimmy Carter.

Job losses soared after Mr. Reagan took control and the unemployment rate peaked at 10.8% in November 1982. In fact, it took Reagan his entire first term to reduce unemployment, so that by January 1985, the rate had fallen only to 7.3%, a stunning "recovery" of  one tenth (.1) of one percentage point in four years.

That's right. The Gipper cut unemployment .1 percentage point.

In four flippin' years.

FAST FORWARD TO JANUARY 2008, when unemployment stood at 5% and the U. S. economy appeared healthy. The crash began on President George W. Bush's watch. By February 2009, ten days after Obama took the oath, the rate had soared to 8.3%. The housing market was collapsing, the stock market had tanked, the auto industry was on life-support, and the ranks of those on food stamps were already ballooning.

Worse yet, the victim still had more stories to fall. In October he finally slammed to the ground and unemployment topped out at 10%.

Since then, the rate has declined slowly but surely, just as it did in 1982. The rate is now 7.8%, still high, but down half a percentage point (.5) since President Obama took over. Yep, you read that right, right-wing haters. The guy you call a communist is beating out the dude whose face you want to chisel on Mt. Rushmore.

When the U. S. economy finally began to recover in June 2009, nearly 600,000 people were filing new unemployment claims monthly. That rate fell last week to 339,000, the lowest figure in four-and-a-half years.

So let's be clear. The stock market crashed when Mr. Bush was twidling his thumbs in the Oval Office. Trillions of dollars of private wealth were wiped from the books. The market bottomed out at 6,547 early in 2009. Today stocks have rebounded, closing out last week at 13,329. Obama hasn't wrecked the U. S. economy.

He helped save it.

We might also remember that panic gripped the nation in the early days of 2009. By February car sales were drying up as families in red states and blue states alike felt the economic pressure. That month the auto industry was on a pace to sell 9.3 million vehicles for the year. Today GM is coming back, Chrysler is solid, and Ford Motors is on a roll. Car sales in September reached a 14.88 million pace.

Meanwhile, sixteen trillion dollars in home equity had been erased by the end of the first quarter of 2009. None of that loss could be blamed on Mr. Obama.

As of today, home prices are headed up. In fact, home equity has rebounded more than $11.5 trillion since the moving van backed up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and deposited Sasha and Malia's books and toys. That's the gain since President Obama rolled up his sleeves and got down to work.

Guess what else is on the mend? U. S. consumer confidence hit a five-year high this month, the best since July 2007.

IN OTHER WORDS, YOU POOR DUMB RIGHT-WING CLUCKS, President Obama saved your free market-loving asses.



If a pilot puts a plane into a crash dive you don't blame the co-pilot
if it takes him a while to stop the steep descent.