January 06, 2012
There he goes again, Paul Krugman is ignoring history to make the Republicans look better. His column today takes issue with Republican front-runner Mitt Romney’s claim that the economy has lost 2 million jobs during the Obama administration. Krugman points out that all the job loss took place in the first six months of the Obama administration. When President Obama took office the economy was losing 700,000 jobs a month. The rate of job growth slowed in the late spring and summer, coinciding with the stimulus beginning to kick in. By the end of the year employment had stabilized. It has been rising slowly in the subsequent two years.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Krugman points out that the Republicans routinely talk about the job growth record of President Bush beginning in 2003, ignoring the first two years of his administration during which the economy lost over 2 million jobs. However, Krugman ignores the fact that Republicans also routinely talked about the job growth record of President Reagan as beginning in 1983, ignoring the first two years of the Reagan administration. This was also a period in which the economy lost more than 2 million jobs.
In short, it is standard practice for Republicans to ignore the beginning of a president’s term, attributing the bad events of that period to their predecessor. In President Obama’s case, Mitt Romney is applying a different and obviously absurd standard that holds him responsible for the economic collapse that was already in process at the time he took office. (Romney would be right to say that the job growth under President Obama has been pathetic.)
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