32 Months, 5.4 MILLION Jobs
This morning brought some unexpectedly good news. Beating expectations, the final jobs report before the election showed that the economy created 184,000 private sector jobs last month. This means that the economy has had 32 straight months — nearly three years — of private sector job creation, making for more than 5.4 MILLION jobs.
The unemployment rate remained essentially unchanged, moving up just .08 percent. Due to rounding, however, the headline rate went from 7.8 percent to 7.9 percent. This slight increase was mostly attributable to more than 500,000 people rejoining the labor force.
Yesterday also brought good news on the economy. Consumer confidence hit its highest level since February 2008. And Chrysler and GM had their best October in five years. Mitt Romney, of course, would have let Detroit go bankrupt.
As the election approaches, it’s important to understand Obama’s real record on jobs. Here’s something that should put it into perspective, net private sector job creation (which means including the millions of jobs lost when Obama first came into office) under Obama and Bush:
If Republicans hadn’t blocked the American Jobs Act last year, we’d have created at least a million additional jobs. And the unemployment rate would be a full point lower if we had averted the public sector job losses (teachers, firefighters, cops, and other state local employees) brought on by GOP austerity.
Mitt Romney’s entire plan for the economy is to take us back to the same failed policies that didn’t create jobs under Bush and ultimately wrecked the economy — tax cuts for the wealthy and letting Wall Street write its own rules. Many of his top economic advisers the same advisers that designed Bush’s failed economic program.
BOTTOM LINE: President Obama saved the auto industry, prevented a depression, and has created millions of private sector jobs since. Mitt Romney said to let Detroit go bankrupt and his plan would kill hundreds of thousands just next year alone. The middle class simply cannot afford the cost of a Romney presidency.
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