What I like most about this Pants on Fire ruling from PolitiFact is that Michele Malkin’s website promoted it. The Michele Malkin, the not as tightly controlled Michele Bachmann, who proclaimed that PolitiFact was nothing but “opinion journalists who masquerade as neutral arbiters of fact." Apparently that doesn’t apply when their most illustrious and popular ruling is being awarded to Democrats like Harry Reid for his recent statement in a senate speech that there was a loss of eight million jobs during the Bush years.
The stock market is considered a leading indicator of macro-economic changes, while job losses are a lagging indicator, that is, as described in “A Beginners Guide to Economic Indicators”: (emphasis added)
…A lagged economic indicator is one that does not change direction until a few quarters after the economy does. The unemployment rate is a lagged economic indicator as unemployment tends to increase for 2 or 3 quarters after the economy starts to improve.
If that’s true, the economy started to tank early in 2008, and then unemployment followed. If we are to view this by quarter as a lagging indicator, it would be fair to say that the first quarter of 2009--at a minimum--belonged to Bush. How was employment through just the first quarter, that is, since the loss of employment started in 2008? From CNN Money: (emphasis added)
For the first three months of the year [2009], 2 million jobs have been lost, and 5.1 million jobs have been lost since the start of 2008.
To put the three-month loss in context, if no more jobs are lost over the next nine months, 2009 would still be the fourth worst year for job losses since the government started tracking the number of workers in 1939.
If we use the percent rate we can get a better handle on the increase in unemployment between Bush and Obama. It went from 4.2% in January of 2001 to 7.8% in January of 2009, an increase of 85%, a straight calculation not considering lagging by extending it through the first quarter. That compares to the current unemployment rate at 9.1%, which was a 17% increase since Obama took office in January, 2009. In other words, the increase in the unemployment rate under Bush was five times that of Obama.
