Dubya v. Obama on jobs

I've been sensing a lot of confusion lately in comparisons of Bush vs. Obama on job creation.

So let's go straight to the official Bureau of Labor Statistics data for non-seasonally adjusted private-sector jobs: http://www.bls.gov/ces/cesbtabs.htm

(I'm deliberately excluding government jobs, because we all know that gov't can't do anything right, and bureaucrats are just a drain on society, and so creating a gov't job is like creating a welfare queen.)

As we all remember, Bush's "Great Recession" officially started in December 2007 and ended in June 2009. In between, 7.26 million jobs were lost in the private sector. That's the hole Obama's digging us out of.

And as you recall, Obama was inaugurated January 20, 2009 and his stimulus bill was passed in February 2009.

From the end of the recession in June 2009 through June 2011, President Obama added 1.16 million private-sector jobs to the U.S. economy.

During Bush's eight years, from February 2001 to January 2009, he added -805,000 jobs in the private sector. That's not a typo. Bush inherited almost 110 million jobs from Clinton, and he bequeathed a little over 109 million jobs to Obama.

Some of you may say my counting is unfair, since a recession began in March 2001 after Bush took office and ended in November 2001. If we measure from the end of Bush's first recession in 2001 to the end of his second term in January 2009 then we get -699,000 net jobs.

Some of you may say that's still not fair, we should count from December 2001 to November 2007, i.e. from the end of Bush's first recession to the beginning of Bush's second recession, and leave out all the recessiony parts. If we do that, then...

... BAM! 6.5 million jobs were created by Bush when he wasn't creating recessions. Way to go, Dubya! Bust an endzone dance!

So you see, finally the selective picture is clear: Bush was a jobs creator; Obama is a jobs killer.

(That liberal rag the Wall Street Journal had the gall to call Bush's job-creation record "The Worst Track Record On Record," but after this little analysis we know better, don't we?)