Economy

Last edited Fri Jan 8, 2021, 01:05 PM - Edit history (40)

# Nonfarm Employment (Establishment Survey, https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001  monthly change

# Nonfarm Private Sector Payroll Employment: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001  monthly change

# Federal employees (includes postal workers, excludes military): http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES9091000001  monthly change

# Manufacturing employees: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES3000000001  monthly change


{#} Job Loss and Creation - Nonfarm Employment At the bottom all post-WWII presidents with completed terms are compared

Factoids (official sources are at the bottom of the page):

# To Do: Make some tables to help make this mass of numbers more coherent.

# Note that an annual revision (downard by 514,000 in the year ending March 2019) of payroll jobs, announced Feb 7, 2020 has been included in the official statistics and in the below.

# Under Obama there were 83 straight months of private sector job growth (since the February 2010 job market bottom), totaling 16.0 million private sector jobs. Total job growth during this period is 15.8 million jobs ( 0.2 million government jobs were lost ).

# The economy Bush handed to Obama lost 4.2 million jobs during the last 10 months of the Bush administration. Furthermore, at the end of the Bush administration the rate of job losses was accelerating -- losing 2.26 million jobs just in his last 3 months -- an average of 753,000 lost jobs a month (the average of the last 3 months of the Bush presidency).

The official sources for all these statistics are at the bottom of the page

# If some rightie says that Bush inherited an economic train wreck from Clinton, you can point out that that the economy (real GDP) was still growing in the last quarter of the Clinton administration at a 2.4% annual rate (Q4 2000), as opposed to the last quarter of the Bush II administration -- it was contracting at an 8.9% annual rate (Q4 2008). Real GDP quarterly percentage change figures are at: http://www.bea.gov/national/xls/gdpchg.xls.

And that in the last 3 months of the Clinton administration 329,000 jobs were created -- yes a slowdown, but not a meltdown. Contrast that to the meltdown in the last 3 months of the Bush administration when 2.3 million jobs were lost.

The numbers for the last 10 months of the Clinton administration: 1.1 million jobs were created. Contrast that to the last 10 months of the Bush administration when 4.3 million jobs were lost.

# 14.5 million nonfarm payroll jobs were created under Obama since June 2009 (that's when the recession ended according to the NBER (nber.org, the official arbiter of when the economic turning points occur) and only 5 months since Obama took office). Bush only created 1.3 million payroll jobs in his entire 8 year presidency.

(See posting EF-3 below for more on this recession thing -- roughly speaking, economists define the end of the recession as when the economy hits bottom, and the faintest signs of economic growth begins -- not when people start singing Happy Days Are Here Again. In other words, the recession is over when we're at the very bottom of the pit and beginning to tentatively claw our way upward. While that's nothing to gurgle ecstatically about, that's still better than falling falling falling like we were under Bush).

# 14.8 million private sector jobs were created under Obama since June 2009 (contrast that to Bush destroying 0.7 million private sector jobs during his presidency)

# Bush's entire 8 year record: 1.3 million payroll jobs were created - by creating 1.8 million government jobs and destroying 0.5 million private sector jobs. ( the actual numbers are, in thousands: Total: 1,347, Govt: 1,744, PrivateSector: -397, updated 1/31/18 ). Yes, it is ironic that a supposed "small government conservative" ended up creating government jobs and destroying private sector jobs.

# Obama's entire 8 year record (including the 4.3 million jobs lost during his first 13 months that was a momentum carry-over from the massive job losses during Bush's last several months): 11.5 million payroll jobs were created - by cutting 0.3 million government jobs and creating 11.8 million private sector jobs. ( the actual numbers are, in thousands: Total: 11,488, Govt: -268, PrivateSector: 11,756, updated 1/31/18 ).

(#.) And then there is this - Romney justifying his poor job creation record at the 3 1/2 year point of his administration as Massachusetts Governor -- by blaming the economy he inherited from his predecessor for the fact that his (Romney's) job numbers kept falling during the first 11 months of his administration -- and touting the number of jobs created (50,000) after his job numbers finally stopped falling. Note this is ironic considering how Romney and the Republicans have spent this campaign blaming Obama for doing the same thing -- pointing to the lousy economy he inherited and pointing to job growth figures since the turn-around. http://www.democraticunderground.com/125198174

Back to Romney's Massachusetts record (see above link for details): that 50,000 post-turnaround job creation record was a poor showing on a per-capita basis compared to the national average at the same time period, or the Obama record during the similar post-turnaround job-recovering period of the Obama administration. And consider that during Romney's entire 4-year term as governor, Massachusetts was 47th in job creation (in percentage increase terms) -- yes, only 3 states had a worse job-creation record.

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# The Clinton economy created 22.9 million payroll jobs of which 21.0 million were in the private sector [updated above on 5/6/16]

# Federal workforce If some rightie claims that Obama increased the federal workforce (as if that was bad), well actually that is true, but tiny: Under Obama the federal workforce increased by 31,000 employees which is a 1.1% increase (over 8 years), far below the rate of U.S. population increase. And note that Romney as governor increased the number of Massachusetts state employees by 5.5% (over 4 years). Also note that Bush II increased the federal workforce by 1.3% (over 8 years)

. . # Source of the Romney figure: "Government Job Loss: President Obama’s Catch 22", ABC News, 6/6/12 http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/government-jobs-loss-president-obamas-catch-22/
. . # Source of the Obama and Bush II figures: BLS data series: Federal employees, seasonally adjusted: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES9091000001
. . . . It includes postal workers, and it excludes the military
. . . . Jan 2009: 2,786,000 , Jan 2017: 2,817,000 (preliminary) , increase: 31,000 (this is a 1.1% increase -- far below the growth in U.S. population)

Job Creation of record of post-WWII Presidents, Average Annual % Increases :
12/13/20 UPDATE: https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214706690#post4
THE BELOW WAS CREATED IN EARLY FEBRUARY AT NEAR THE PEAK OF THE PRE-COVID ECONOMY. Even so, it shows that Trump was a less-than-median job creator even at his high point. Now, according to the latest jobs report that came out October 2, Trump has lost 3.907 Million jobs since January 2017 when Obama left office, whch comes to 89,000 jobs lost per month during these 44 months. This of course, puts Trump last in the table as the only post WW-II loser

(Sorted from best to worst by average annual percentage increase in jobs. Republicans in red, Democrats in blue.)

Notice that -- with the tiny exception (0.2% difference) of Nixon to Kennedy -- the worst Democrat has a better record than the best Republican -- that is, until Obama, who inherited an economy that was losing several hundred thousand jobs a month And actually, Kennedy did not have a chance to complete his term -- had he done so, and had he had the same job creation numbers in December 1963 through January 1965 as Johnson had (a 3.48%/year annualized rate of increase), he would have easily topped Nixon.

Post-WWII Presidents ranked by Average Annual Percentage Increase In Jobs (the last column):
. . (updated 2/7/20 after new jobs report released - it has revisions going back decades.)




THE ABOVE WAS CREATED IN EARLY FEBRUARY AT NEAR THE PEAK OF THE PRE-COVID ECONOMY. Even so, it shows that Trump was a less-than-median job creator even at his high point. Now, according to the latest jobs report that came out October 2, Trump has lost 3.907 Million jobs since January 2017 when Obama left office, whch comes to 89,000 jobs lost per month during these 44 months. This of course, puts Trump last in the table as the only post WW-II loser

(Actually, the true jobs peak of the Trump economy was in February 2020 -- he gained another 251,000 jobs in February, which would make his 37 month record at the end of February 184,054 jobs/month, which comes to 1.52% average annual increase in jobs -- only trivially better than the 182,194 and 1.50% numbers shown in the table (which are at the end of January), and certainly doesn't affect his ranking from what is shown in the table).

Remember, Obama inherited the deepest recession since World War II, which lost 4.2 million jobs in the last 10 months of his predecessor, and in the last 3 months of his predecessor was losing 753,000 jobs a month. With that momentum, job losses continued for the first 13 months of the Obama presidency -- through February 2010 -- totalling 4.3 million jobs lost during those 13 months.

Anyway, despite the 4.3 million jobs lost in his first 13 months because of the Bush crash, Obama still beats 4 of the last 7 post-WWII Republican presidents (the count of 7 post-WWII Republican presidents includes Trump). Of these Republican presidents, only Nixon, Reagan, and Ford had better records than Obama, and Ford only edged him out by 0.01 percentage points.

In the above table, the average annual % increase in jobs (the last column) is a much fairer way to compare presidents than just the raw job creation figures in thousands because the latter is unfair to the earlier presidents who were working with much smaller labor forces to begin with. For example the number of job holders at the beginning of Truman's administration was only 38% as many as at the beginning of Clinton's administration, and 31% as many as at the beginning of G.W. Bush's administration. So Truman's pathetic-looking 93,570 jobs/month creation record turns out to be even better than Clinton's 238,521 jobs/month record when adjusted for the size of the labor force at the beginning of their terms.

In raw thousands of jobs created per year, both Reagan and Nixon beat Truman. But when adjusted for the size of the labor force -- again, by looking at average annual percentage increases in jobs -- Truman beats them both.

Official sources of information for the above:

# Payroll Jobs: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001
# Monthly change of above: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth
# . . Hint: to see both of the above two together on the same page, go to http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001 and click on the "More Formatting Options" link in the upper right and check the "Original Data Value" and the "1-Month Net Change" checkboxes and click the "Retrieve Data" button halfway down the page on the left
# Private Sector Payroll Employment: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001
# Monthly change of above: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001?output_view=net_1mth
# . . Hint: to see both of the above two together on the same page, go to http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001
and click on the "More Formatting Options" link in the upper right and check the "Original Data Value" and the "1-Month Net Change" checkboxes and click the "Retrieve Data" button halfway down the page on the left

The United States Unemployment Rate. Every Time The Democrats Fix It, The Republicans F*CK It Up (1960-2016)


This one USED TO compare all post-WWII presidents on a term by term basis, with and without an 8 month lag:

"The monthly statistics are quoted from January, as U.S. presidents take office at the end of that month, and from September (bold), as this is the last month of the federal fiscal year."

Unfortunately, they recently got rid of the 8-month lag figures. Also the numbers for Obama are a little bit out of date, my guess is that it doesn't incorporate the annual revisions the BLS makes to the past numbers. They show 145,554,000 payroll jobs at the end of Obama's presidency whereas I see 145,696,000 in January 2017 ( https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001 ), a difference of 142,000 jobs (although not a big whoop though when looking at average job creation over a 96 month presidency). And that might change again when the BLS makes their annual revision to past numbers again on 2/1/19, sigh.

The loss of the 8 month lag especially hurts Obama (3.8 million jobs were lost during the first 8 months of the Obama administration, thanks to carry-over of the Bush housing bubble burst recession -- 3.8 million jobs (coincidentally) were lost during the last 8 months of the Bush administration.

Anyway, an interesting page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobs_created_during_U.S._presidential_terms


Current Employment Statistics Highlights - Detailed Industry Employment Analysis (employment changes by industry -- a summary followed by 4-5 year charts)

http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/ceshighlights.pdf