... and actually you can lie about them, people do all the time.




First off, our unemployment rate isn't 8%, it is well into the double digits, more than 2% have given up on finding a job and don't count in. Second, 'job' is a nebulous term, in a bad economy you don't just lose 1% when you go from 4 to 5%, you lost more than 1% but some new jobs were made as well, and typically new people too. Losing 100,000 jobs paying 80k a year and gaining 80,000 jobs paying 60k a year in a given month is a much bigger hit then 'Net 20k loss' implies. It is even worse if one remembers we add about a couple hundred thousand people to the economy every month, and those people need jobs.

It's also very arbitrary to say when a given president began influencing the economy, because there is overlap, and even failed candidates can influence sectors of the economy as early as the late primary, for good or ill, yet a lame duck president doesn't influence much change and Obama like Bush will be fairly impotent his whole last year or two in office if the GOP makes even minimal senate gains, a very long lame duck, then their policies remain in place for months or years even when they are ones that can be changed without super-majorities. The standard 'It is Bush's fault' rebuttal is to point out that when A Dem Congress took over in Spring 2007 unemployment was at 4%, and only a fool thinks congress doesn't impact the economy on a scale parallel to POTUS.

People who want to credit or blame a president will look for the high/low spots and just proclaim that is when his influence began or ended. This is, of course, self-serving nonsense by either party and all pundits. Presidential influence lasts for decades and economic impact can take place before a man is sworn in or a bill signed, or decades after the doors swing open on their memorial library. They can also overlap, and for that matter the graphs on U-3 & U-6 rates don't always parallel too closely and often aren't too close to GDP per capita or median income or median household income or retail sales or industrial output and these are all legitimate and often contradictory ways of measuring how well things are going.

And none of that, however important, addresses the issue that the economy is like the weather, you can point to things that have major impacts and sometimes even say, reasonably too, 'this specific incident caused about this much damage' but most of the time you can't and most of the time the plus and minus is only loosely under gov't control. If OPEC jacks up fuel rates you can claim it was bad diplomacy by POTUS but that's usually 90% bull. Blaming the king for bad weather and ruined crops is a common practice, and a foolish one, though morally justified for the leaders who have claimed miracle powers I suppose.

An undeniable fact is that the economy sucks, but if you want to lay some or all of it at a president's feet, or credit for gains made, don't toss out unemployment data casually. Bring up the policies you feel helped or harmed for discussion, the audience here isn't composed of children for all that a lot of the political comments of late have seemed like they were authored by them. Either in terms of over-simplicity or nasty tone, you don't need to add to it by a three sentence thread with minimal substance. We've already got way too many threads that amount to 'This is my opinion, accept it as fact or you're an utter moron'.