Oh by the way, job creation remained awful in September

Below replacement rates, and no reason to expect improvement any time soon

, --October 7, 2016

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You apparently think Obama is doing a great job, so maybe it doesn't matter that he isn't. But if job creation means anything at all to the nation's economic health - and in fact, it means a ton - he's going about as bad a job as a president ever has. Liberals like to say, "Because math!" OK. When the population is growing faster than you're adding jobs to employ all the new people, what's that? One of two answers would be acceptable:
  1. A crap sandwich; or
  2. The perpetual state of the Obama economy, and in September, nothing changed:
U.S. employment growth unexpectedly slowed for the third straight month in September and the jobless rate rose, which could make the Federal Reserve more cautious about raising interest rates. Nonfarm payrolls rose 156,000, down from a gain of 167,000 jobs in August, the Labor Department said on Friday, while the unemployment rate ticked up a tenth of a percentage point to 5.0 percent as more Americans rejoined the labor force. The data suggested the economy was on firm ground, but not growing so swiftly as to knock the Fed off its game plan of raising borrowing costs only gradually. "It's an economy that is doing okay. It's not necessarily accelerating, but it's certainly doing okay," said Jonathan Lewis, chief investment officer at Fiera Capital in New York. On balance, the job market continues to improve, which could be an asset for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 U.S. election. She has argued that the Obama administration's policies have helped the economy create millions of jobs.
Maybe these numbers represent "on-balance improvement" in Reuterville, but in the real world people can see that things are not even OK, let alone good. This is what you get when you haven't been able to get past 2.0 percent annualized growth for your entire presidency, and it's why Mike Pence resonates when he says this is not the best we can do, it's only the best they can do. For awhile, Obama was able to hide behind a couple of obfuscations. One was the fact that most people don't really know what represents healthy job growth and what doesn't. So to the average person, 100,000 new jobs might seem like a lot, but the person who understands labor markets knows it's really not. The same thing holds when Hillary says Obama has "helped create millions of jobs." Sure. Stay in office eight years and anyone will. But "millions" would be "many tens of millions" if the economy was healthy. Most people don't know that. They also don't know that the U3 unemployment rate, which is usually the one reported by the media, is completely misleading at 5.0 percent because it doesn't take into account people who have dropped out of the workforce. It's much more relevant that the workforce participation rate stands at a staggeringly low 68 percent, which is the lowest we've seen since the Carter Administration. The closer we get to the election, the more you'll see the media try to spin these terrible numbers as Reuters did in the above excerpt, arguing that Obama's record on jobs can somehow be offered as good news for Hillary. That seems impossible, given the realities of his record. But if independent voters get their news from CNN, the Today Show and Reuters, don't be so sure it can't happen.

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Dan Calabrese——

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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