President Obama's economic record

Vice President Biden recently acknowledged that the American middle class has been "buried" over the last four years.

Indeed, forty-four months into Barack Obama's presidency, the nation's economy is in an awful condition:

• 8.1% of Americans are unemployed, constituting over 12.5 million people.
• Factoring in the millions who have stopped looking for work and part-time employees who are unable to find full-time work, the unemployment rate is really 14.7%.
• Five million Americans have been unemployed for 6 months or longer.
• Unemployment has been above 8 percent for 43 consecutive months.  That number NEVER went above 6.5% under President Bush from the time he took office in 2001 until late 2008. 
• Monthly job growth is below 100,000.  This means that the number of jobs being added to the economy is less than we need just to keep pace with the growth in population, i.e., the number of new people who need to feed their families.
• Many of the jobs that have been added are in lower-paying industries.
• For American small business, which is commonly considered to be the main engine of job growth, growth is roughly zero.
• The labor force shrank 368,000 last month, and many of those people simply gave up looking for work.
• Labor force participation rate has dropped to the point where only 63.5 percent of the population is working or looking for work.  This is the lowest level since shortly after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1981.
• Our nation's economic growth estimates have been revised down to 1.3%, which is less than the rate of inflation.  
• At this point in Ronald Reagan's first term in 1984, the economy was growing at well over 5% and adding over 300,000 jobs per month (in a country with far fewer people).
• Medium American household income is LOWER than it was at the depth of the recession in 2009.  In fact, it dropped just as much from 2009 to 2011 (all under President Obama) as it did from 2007 to 2009 (under Bush and Obama combined).
• Nearly 50 MILLION Americans are using food stamps, and food stamp usage has increased nearly 50% since President Obama took office.

• In sum, this is the worst post-recession recovery period in at least 40 years, and arguably much longer.

President Obama is responsible for this economy, as he has acknowledged.

He even said that he would not be reelected if he wasn't "done" fixing the economy by now:

The latest jobs news is stark:

Even so, President Obama still makes outlandish claims about how things are going:

And even when he acknowledges that things are bad, he argues--without evidence--that it would be worse if not for his leadership.

Indeed, after spending a trillion dollars on stimulus programs that have not markedly improved the economy, President Obama has joked on occasion about the failure of his economic leadership.

To verify the statistics used on this page, see:

• http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/09/18/report-median-income-worse-now-than-it-was-during-great-recession/
• finance.yahoo.com/news/us-economy-adds-96k-jobs-123111662.html
• www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-07/payrolls-in-u-s-rose-96-000-in-august-jobless-rate-falls.html
• http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/%E2%80%A6/91da9a88-f84e-11e1-8253-3f495ae70650_story.html?hpid=z2
• http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf
• http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
• http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/09/28/How-Romney-Can-Win-the-Debates-and-Close-the-Gap.aspx#page1
• http://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/2012/09/27/us-2q-gdp-growth-revised-down-to-13/
• http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth