Above is a chart from Veronique de Rugy at the Mercatus Center designed to make Barack Obama look bad. An interesting issue is what will this chart look like if Obama gets re-elected?
By my calculations, that’d give him 52 additional months in office. And say that for those next 52 months, Obama totally fails to spark bounce-back growth or make meaningful progress back toward full employment. Instead, we keep on adding about 150,000 jobs per month just as we have for the past 18 months. That’ll add 7.8 million jobs to the current total, rocketing Obama ahead of Kennedy, Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and George W. Bush. Still hardly the greatest record in American history, but not too shabby at all.
And yet all it would take for Obama to go from last place to average would be for the current disappointing labor market performance to continue. Which I think tells you that we’re looking at a problematic metric.
