After Barack Obama’s inaugural speech only mentioned the economy once and jobs just three times in a 2100-word address, the White House pronounced themselves shocked, shocked that anyone would have assumed that neither was a priority for Obama in his second term. The White House promised that the State of the Union would focus more on jobs and growth, and at least rhetorically, they delivered. The speech contains 32 mentions of the word “jobs,” and six mentions of “growth,” although one of those references was a claim that ObamaCare was already “helping to slow the growth of health care costs.”
Factually, though, Obama still hasn’t improved. Instead, he continued his same cherry-picking ways of calculating job growth during his four years in office, and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler was among the first to notice it. Obama used — as he has done for more than two years now — a baseline of February 2010 to calculate jobs growth during his administration, which ignores the first 13 months of his presidency and the first 12 months of his supposed “stimulus” bill. That led to some dishonest claims in the SOTU:
“After years of grueling recession, our businesses have created over six million new jobs.”
The president is cherry-picking a number that puts the improvement in the economy in the best possible light. The low point in jobs was reached in February 2010, and there has indeed been a gain of about 6 million jobs since then, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. But the data also show that since the start of his presidency, about 1.2 million jobs have been created—and the number of jobs in the economy is about 3.2 million lower than when the recession began in December,2007.
Even if we give him a pass on the first five months of his presidency, while the Great Recession he “inherited” rolled to its technical end, the number isn’t close to 6 million. From June 2009 to January 2013, we added 4.598 million jobs in 43 months — an average just shy of 107,000 jobs per month (all figures from BLS Table B data). That’s not enough to keep up with population growth (which requires 125k-150K per month), which is why our workforce participation rate sank from 65.7% in June 2009 to 63.6% in 2012, where it remains, near a 31-year low hit last August. In the private sector, that number goes to 4.968 million, or slightly under 116,000 per month.
The next claim was an even bigger fib:
“After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three.”Obama again is cherry-picking a jobs number. The low point for manufacturing jobs was reached in January 2010, and so there has been a gain of 500,000 jobs since then. But BLS data show that the number of manufacturing jobs is still 600,000 fewer than when Obama took office in the depths of the recession—and 1.8 million fewer than when the recession began in December, 2007.
In this case, there has been actual growth of about 229,000 manufacturing jobs since June 2009. But the job loss didn’t really start “more than ten years” ago; we had over 14 million manufacturing jobs as late as January 2007, when the recession first hit. Since then, we have lost more than 2 million manufacturing jobs, and have 11.95 million in January 2013. And we have only added 109,000 over the past year, and have actually dropped below July 2012′s 11.957 million figure. Manufacturing employment has stagnated since then.
FactCheck gets into the act on the jobs front, as well as claims about ObamaCare slowing the growth of health-care costs:
We all laugh at this bullshit coming out of Zeros mouth, but Rush just played the Frank Luntz focus group clips and all the Romney voters in it buy all of what Zero tells them at face value. Straw men and phoney issues work. That is why the GOP will be a regional party from here on out.
RIGHT'S RIGHT 
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Wed Feb 13, 2013 11:53 am
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