60 days, 60 stats - #6

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Today's number is 4,500,000 - the number of private sector jobs created over the past 29 months.  It doesn't take a genius to look at this graph and see how Obama turned around a negative jobs situation upon taking office.  Mitt Romney claims his time at Bain Capital resulted in the creation of 100,000 jobs, but the Washington Post awarded him 3 Pinocchios for that claim.  For those who don't know how private equity firms work, Bain actually invented a model that is very popular called a leveraged buyout; buying existing firms with money mostly borrowed from banking institutions and using the newly bought firms' assets as collateral, and selling them off in a few years.  A side effect of this is often bankrupting the company or shutting down factories/stores to make the firm more profitable.  It actually makes perfect business sense, to the point that the model has become widely adopted in the finance industry.  You just need to not care about the poor slobs you layoff.  Ironically, Mitt Romney meets the technical definition of unemployed - he has no job today, yet he is actively seeking employment.

Has Obama created "enough" jobs?  Well, that depends on whether you have a job or not.  Here's a bigger question - to what degree is the President truly really responsible for creating jobs?  The GOP has taken to replacing the word "millionaire" with "job creator" in all their talking points because it sounds better to say "tax cuts for job creators" rather than "tax cuts for millionaires."  Of course the Dems call them millionaires.  Funny thing though, that these people have a net worth over $1,000,000 is a demonstrable fact; that they are out there creating jobs is not. Do we blame the President when there are not enough jobs, yet credit these so-called "job creators" when there are enough to go around?

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