The GOP’s Big Lie on Obama and jobs

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-gops-big-lie-on-obama-and-jobs/2012/01/06/gIQAT5HzeP_blog.html

Posted at 10:36 AM ET, 01/06/2012
The GOP’s Big Lie on Obama and jobs
By Greg Sargent

In the wake of today’s better-than-expected jobs report, Newt Gingrich has now released a statement bashing Obama for failing on the economy. He did this by echoing Mitt Romney’s favorite Big Lie — i.e., that the way to evaluate the success or failure of Obama’s jobs policies is to look at how many net jobs have been created or lost since he took office:

“Three full years into the Obama presidency, and there are still 1.7 million fewer Americans going to work today than there were on Obama’s Inauguration Day. snip

But they reach this conclusion by factoring in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs that the free-falling economy continued to shed in the months that passed after Obama took office but before his stimulus took effect. Indeed Gingrich is quite explicit about this, defining his metric as a comparison between how many Americans are going to work today versus how many went to work at the time of Obama’s inauguration.

Though today’s numbers are cause for cautious optimism, there’s no denying that jobs have not been created as fast as we would like on Obama’s watch. But come on — the citation of jobs lost before Obama’s policies passed as evidence that those policies were a failure is just ludicrously, cosmically absurd, and should not be allowed to stand.

[FarLeftFist]

1. Because their nightmare is the fact that his policies have worked.

[gratuitous]

2. It's like the Bush years never happened

Everything bad that happened for Bush (and there were plenty of them early on, also later on, and later on, and later on), the Republicans were quick to say that it was all because of those bad old Clinton years. Even into his second term, Republicans could be counted on to ignore any failings of the Bush administration, and attribute them to Clinton.

But according to these same Republicans, Obama is responsible for everything that happened from the minute he was sworn in, if not before. TARP is laid at Obama's feet, even though it was passed during the waning moments of the Bush administration. Now Gingrich is carping on the net jobs of the Obama administration? Republicans couldn't be bothered with net job losses or gains during the Bush years. In fact, I think Bush the Stupider was the first president ever to leave office with net negative job numbers. Somehow that doesn't impress itself on the Republican mind.

[ProgressiveEconomist]

3. Why didn't he use the 'bikini chart'?

This is from http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_12/private_sector_jobs_picture_al033849.php .

Steve Benen's "Political Animal" column updates this bar chart of private sector job growth monthly. Rahel Maddow calls it "the bikini chart".

I hope President Obama has a huge blow-up of the January update of the bikini chart behind him for his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.behind him

[ProgressiveEconomist]

4. 'Natura non facit saltum'

(Nature does not make discountinuous jumps) was the epigram on the frontispiece of the widely-read lste nineteenth century economics text "Principles of Economics" by Alfred Marshall.

IMO, this is what the bikin chart and the WP article in the OP are saying. Thus it well may be accurate to say that Newt Gingrich does not know the FIRST THING about economics!

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natura_non_facit_saltus for the origins and use of this principle by great scientists mathematicians and philosophers throughout history.