From Pine View Farm

A Picture Is Worth, Job Creators Dept. 4

Chart showing that job numbers consistently go up under Democratic presidents, down under Republican ones, since Roosevelt.

One more time, with Republicans, watch what they do, not what they say.

Via Job’s Anger.

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4 comments

  1. George Smith

    September 8, 2015 at 3:14 pm

    It’s an irrefutable comparison but not particularly meaningful or reassuring anymore. I don’t remember the intervening years as anything good. Rather, it was just a constant downward slog, from the closing of a county aluminum plant when I was a kid to the slow destruction of Bethlehem Steel through my later college and postdoctoral years. There weren’t any presidents who did anything meaningful for the economy or jobs. My recollection was the Bill Clinton was also especially bad. It was not happy days. If he presided over an economy that created jobs, they were all the wrong kind — small numbers for the beginning of the Wall Street boom and lots of useless, poor pay work in a growing service economy. He did, of course, spur a great deal of growth in the private sector prison industry. The Bushes were terrible. Obama treaded water after the Great Recession. There has been no significant growth except in the very top end and the national security infrastructure.

    The diagram could be repurposed to show how badly the US government made economic policy.

     
  2. Frank

    September 8, 2015 at 5:52 pm

    True, but I think it’s relevant as it speaks to the myth of Republicanism as something that creates jobs.

    The declining quality of jobs, or at least of wages, is probably as much a result of the emasculation of unions, also a Republican thing, as of any other single cause.

     
  3. George Smith

    September 8, 2015 at 10:37 pm

    Yes, the GOP hates unions and with the wealthy have worked at destroying membership for decades. The Democratic Party has also not been friendly to them. In fact, it moved away from populist union support as we well know. The GOP presidential candidates had no presence on Labor Day. Hillary Clinton was not much better. She had one of her usual unremarkable but awkward half measure statements to the effect that she might arrest a few people for wage stealing were she to become president.

    The GOP’s much worse, agreed. And then there’s The Democrat who phones everything in after consulting with her millionaire adviser leftovers from the glory years.

     
  4. Frank

    September 8, 2015 at 10:48 pm

    I cannot defend the Democratic Party for running scared of Republicans since Reagan.

    The right succeeded in making “liberal” a dirty word, and Democrats did not have the guts to fight back. Meanwhile, the “news” media lives in a fantasy world in which somehow the truth is in the “center,” while there is no center other than the mythological one in the minds of the beltway insiders.

    I may wish a pox on all their houses, but I still must vote in the real world. If I must vote for “less bad,” I shall vote for “less bad.”