Suddenly, It’s a New Presidential Race
Both presidential candidates made bold claims in last night’s debate about taxes on the middle class and the future of Medicare. How much of what they said is true and how much is political maneuvering?
Be sure to check out the facts from last night’s debate at the NCPA’s Reality Check fact-check center. We’ll be sifting through the true and untrue claims made by both sides and posting the facts and analyses to the Reality Check website.
Check the website often and continue to check back right up until the election, or visit the website and subscribe to our posts via email, RSS, or follow us on Twitter.
Romney did well overall. Let’s see if he can keep it up.
It’s his race to lose.
Romney performed better than most people expected. By contrast, President Obama seemed perplexed when he tried to explain the benefits of ObamaCare to the audience… (interestingly, he actually referred to it as ObamaCare).
Political debates nowadays seem to be more about who says the right things, who persuades the audience better, who uses the most “convincing” arguments…no matter how unrealistic you sound…and Americans actually buy it!
It’s so hard to believe anything either candidate said on last night’s debate. One thing is what you say, and something completely different is what you actually DO.
How Convenient
If you listened to President Obama during last night’s debate, you’d think job growth during his presidency has been robust. He stated right up front “Over the last 30 months, we’ve seen 5 million jobs in the private sector created.” Well, 30 months is an interesting period because he’s been president for 44 months, so what’s happened since he’s been in charge? From January, 2009 through August, 2012, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, non-farm private sector employment has fallen by 261,000 jobs. Federal government employment has risen by 14,000, state government jobs have fallen by 158,000, and local government jobs have fallen by 532,000. Total jobs lost: 937,000. If you cherry-pick the data, February, 2010 shows the lowest private-sector employment since Obama took office; 4,317,000 jobs lost in his first 13 months in office. But from February, 2010 we observe the greatest growth in employment because of the low base starting point. It’s also 30 months ago from the Bureau’s latest reported data. How convenient to use that date. Do you think the president knew this, or did he forget that he took office in January, 2009? His apparent cherry picking of the data to mask the reality of overall job losses does not help the American people go back to work. It also degrades his credibility.
William G. Shipman is chairman of CarriageOaks Partners, LLC and co-chairman of the Cato Institute’s Project on Social Security Choice
wgs@carriageoaks.org
Glad to see the NCPA has a factcheck now!
I still think that is all they are: claims.
Do you blame them for not having any accountability? People don’t bother to educate themselves, and they certainly don’t realize that when a politician has a silver tongue.. it’s probably forked.
William: I disagree. Measuring from the bottom of the business cycle trough to now is not deceptive.
August:
Fair enough, sort of, but first a couple of facts. You stated “William: I disagree. Measuring from the bottom of the business cycle trough to now is not deceptive.” Presumably, you’re implying that that is what the president did; therefore, he was not being deceptive when he stated that 5 million private sector jobs were created over the last 30 months.
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the firm that opines when recessions begin and end, the recession ended June, 2009 when there were 130,503,000 private sector jobs. That was 38 months ago, not the 30 months that President Obama stated. From the end of the recession until the debate (August employment data were the last available), 2,883,000 private sector jobs were created, not the 5,000,000 stated by the president. So, if your opinion that the starting point should be the economic trough, and that is the date the president used, then job creation was a fraction of the president’s assertion. But that begs the question of why the president used 30 months. It may be just a coincidence, but that was the lowest employment level of any month since he took office in January, 2009. It is axiomatic that using the lowest base number, holding all else constant, will provide the greatest gain. But still 5 million private-sector jobs were not created during the 30 months, rather 4.1 million.
Here’s the “sort of” point. Using the bottom of the recession as the starting point seems to take a president off the hook. Imagine that a president’s policies cause a recession to be deeper and longer than it otherwise would. Your business cycle trough starting point seems to give him a pass. This seems to me to be illogical. All presidents should be held accountable for their policies. And their impact should be judged from the totality of the data, not the data point that provides the best results.
I thank you for taking the effort to comment.
Bill Shipman