Our Backwards President

 

By Bob Beauprez
TownHall.com

The June jobs report was disappointing for the third consecutive month – just 80,000 new jobs created. And, yet the President said "that's a step in the right direction."

Baloney!

Two new workers are being added to the population for every one job that is created. The only direction Obama has the economy moving is backward.

A quick look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics report shows that the Civilian Labor Force grew by 156,000 workers in June – nearly twice the number of new jobs.

Just to keep up with population growth, on average our economy needs to be adding about 125,000 jobs per month. To dig out from this deep sustained recession, replace the 8 million jobs lost and keep pace with population growth, economists tell us that we need to be creating at least 250,000 jobs monthly for about five years.

However, over the last three months the size of the work force population has increased by 75,000 more than the total number of people with a job. Obama's economic policies don't even have us treading water, much less moving forward.

In addition to the phony "right direction" claim last Friday, Obama touted the creation of "4.4 million new jobs over the past 28 months." It actually has been 30 months, but close enough considering the source.

But, what Obama chooses to ignore is that the population total increased by 7.3 million over those same 30 months, according to the Labor Department. Using a normal Labor Force Participation Rate of 66.5%, slightly more that 5 million new jobs would have been necessary just to keep pace with population growth.

Not only has Obama failed to lead us to a strong economic recovery, the numbers from his own Labor Department suggest we're still losing ground.