While everyone is still fixated on the jobs report that came out on Friday, I thought I'd do a little compare and contrast of my own to see how the current president stacks up against the previous one in terms of job creation.
So I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics site to see how each president did in his monthly jobs total:
http://data.bls.gov/...
Then, in fairness to each candidate, I eliminated his first year in office, on the assumption that it takes about that long for an administration's actions to be truly felt in the economy and because many of the job gains and losses during that period can be attributed to policies put in place by the previous administration (believe me, it's almost as much a kindness to Bush as it is to Obama to do so, 2001 being a year of almost continual job losses).
That means I didn't include either 2001 or 2009 in my calculations.
So what did I find?
From January 2002 to July 2004, under the Bush administration, a net total of 768,000 public and private-sector jobs were created.
From January 2010 to July 2012, under the Obama administration, a net total of 3,926,000 public and private sector jobs were created.
That's right. In the same exact time period, five times more jobs have been created during the Obama administration than during Bush's. So much for the theory that cutting rich people's taxes leads to job growth.
Also, 13 months of the Bush administration saw job losses as opposed to 6 during the Obama administration.
I wish the Bureau would separate out the private-sector from the public-sector jobs statistics, since I believe Obama would wallop Bush even more if that were the case. In fact, if it weren't for continued public-sector job losses under Obama, the gap between the two presidents would be far greater.
And imagine if he had had his jobs plan passed!
9:56 AM PT: For private-sector-only statistics, see shaso's comment below.