The Colonel's Forum

What about the rate at which we're adding jobs?  Is that better than 4 years ago?  Yup.  Four years ago we were losing 800,000 jobs a month.  Now we're adding them at roughly 100,000 a month.  Obama's record month in 2010 added over 400,000 jobs in a single month, more than Bush ever added in a single month. Think it's a fluke?  Refer to part #7 in the series, where I compare Democratic vs. Republican presidents over the last 50+ years.

Let's continue the jobs theme for today's statistic.  Thanks to Bill Clinton for researching this one for me :-) 42,000,000 - private sector jobs added to the economy under Democrat Presidents over the last 52 years. 24,000,000 - private sector jobs added to the economy under GOP Presidents over the last 52 years. Think he's full of it?   Politifact says his numbers are accurate . In case you're wondering, that's 24 years of Democrats, 28 years of Republicans, going back to (and including) Kennedy.  The Democrats achieved that number with 4 fewer years in the oval office, and this includes Obama's 4 years which were the worst recession during the period. Mitt Romney said " this election is about jobs ."  I agree.  If you can look at these numbers and honestly convince yourself "Romney's financial plan is not at all like Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush; he'll buck the trend," then I can't help you.

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 s...