The U.S. Department of Labor reported this morning that while the unemployment rate fell marginally from 8.2% to 8.1%, only 115,000 non-farm jobs were created in April. It did not take long for Mitt Romney to hop on Fox and Friends to criticize President Obama.
Romney claiming that a solid recovery would involve month-after-month of 500,000 new jobs being created each month is about as silly as Gingrich running on $2.00 gasoline.
The monthly job creation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is available on-line for the years 1939 to 2012. Since January, 1980, 500,000 jobs or more have been created in a single month a grand total of three times, or once in every ten years. September 1983 (Reagan), September 1997 (Clinton), and May of 2010, on Obama's watch. In fact, if we drop down to months in which 400,000 jobs or more were created, we only add another ten months in which this has happened since 1980.
Since 1939, there has been only two occasions where the U.S. experienced back-to-back months of 500,000 or more non-farm jobs being created, March and April 1946, during the Truman administration shortly after the end of World War II, and March and April 1978, during the Carter administration.
Since January 1939, there have been more than 400,000 non-farm jobs created in just 54 months out of 876 months. Of the 54 occasions, 43 of the months (or 80% of the occasions) had a Democrat in the White House. George Bush's administration never saw as many as 400,000 new jobs created in a single month.
Romney and his team know how to access labor data. They simply prefer to ignore it in order to distort.
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