Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul
asks a question:
When is the last time in our country we created millions of jobs?
Unfortunately, he wasn't interested in the answer. Or, more specifically, he thought he knew the answer:
It was under Ronald Reagan.
Wrong.
One way you could look at it is total number of jobs created during each presidency since Reagan. If you did that, here's what you'd get:
- Reagan: 16.1 million (8 years)
- Bush 41: 2.6 million (4 years)
- Clinton: 22.9 million (8 years)
- Bush 43: 1.3 million (8 years)
- Obama: 4.0 million (6 years, 2 months)
Or, to look at it a different way, since Reagan became president, a total of 20 million jobs have been created in the 20 years with Republicans in the Oval Office. Meanwhile, 26.9 million jobs have been created in the 14 years with Democrats in office. And here's the amazing thing: These numbers attribute 4.3 million jobs lost during Bush's Great Recession to Obama—if you factored those out, the total job tally would be 31 million jobs under Democrats to 16 million jobs under Republicans.
As Bill Scher pointed out, the absurdity of Rand Paul's misstatement of facts really disproves the case Paul was trying to make—that the Republican economic philosophy is better for regular working people. Paul believes the GOP needs to shed its image of being the party of the rich, which is obviously true, but his solution for doing that is to fall back on the same old trickle-down economic policies that make the economy so much worse under Republican presidents. Republicans don't need new spin: They need new policies.