I continue to be intrigued by the BLS job loss data from the current recession. The chart at the left is a slightly revised version of a chart I put together for another discussion on the web. It indicates the number of jobs gained / lost each month since the recession started in December of 2007. I updated the chart with the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today when I noticed this bit of propaganda on the OFA web site. That looks really familiar to me – that’s my chart!

From a political perspective, the questions are, who gets the blame for the job losses, who gets the credit for the improving job situation, and when does that transition of responsibility occur?

You can click on either of the above images to expand it.

I think if you are a Republican, you can try to spin it in one of two ways.

You can assign all blame to Obama on the moment he took the oath. In terms of job losses this makes Obama responsible for the majority of the job losses. Just barely, but he gets the most blame. However, if you do this then Obama gets the credit for the entire trend line from the day he took office. Which makes Obama look pretty good relative to Bush’s trendline.

Alternatively, you can say that the upward trend line that started in early 2009 was the result of Bush policies and not Obama policies. This gives Bush credit for the bounce back. But it also pins the blame for the vast majority of job losses on Bush depending on which date you transition responsibility from Bush to Obama.

Here are the four dates that seem most reasonable for a transition of responsibility:

• 1/20/2009 at noon: Obama takes office.
• 2/1/2009: First reasonable date by which any Obama policy could have had an impact on the economy
• 3/1/2009: The stimulus had been passed on February 17, 2009. First reasonable date by which any stimulus funding could be in the system.
• 4/1/2009: A more reasonable date by which the stimulus could have an effect.

Quite honestly I believe the right date to do the transition is 4/1/2009. This pins most of the job losses on Bush, but also gives him credit for some of the bounceback. He did make some reasonable moves (entirely Keynesian) at the end of his term that did impact positively on the economy. And by April 1st Obama had been in office enough that his policies were now having measureable effect on the economy so he should start to share in the blame (continued job losses) and the credit (improving job loss trend line).

So the spin was why I continued to think about these numbers. But the bulk of my post above doesn’t really align with the title of the post. When I stopped thinking about the blame for a bit, I started to realize the massive scope of what has happened to us. And it was stunning.

We lost roughly 8.3MM jobs in 26 months. And really its more like 12MM when you consider that we need to add 150k jobs a month just to keep pace with population growth. 12 million jobs is a lot of jobs. It’s an incredible number. From 1992 to 2007 we added about 24 million jobs (18MM Clinton, 6MM Bush). We’ve lost half of those. Whoever is in office, will we get them back?

Even if we add 300k jobs a month, it would be 80 months before we made back all those losses (150k to keep even with population growth, 150k to catch up.) That’s 2015. But adding 300k jobs a month isn’t easy and isn’t likely to happen anytime before 2011.While adding 300k jobs a month is possible, it isn’t easy to sustain. Clinton added 18MM jobs in his eight years of office. Those were good times. If you average out the numbers, however, it works out to an average of 187,500 jobs per month. So we are looking at requiring a pace of job growth 60% higher than the 1990s just to catch up.

It’s terrible to think about. It’s terrible for America. For GenX, the only major recession we remember was when we were pre-teens – and for GenY who have never known a recession in their entire lives – this is pretty frightening. Could it be that those jobs are NEVER coming back? Not ever? It scares me to think about it.

You can find the source data for my charts at BLS:

http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?data_tool=latest_numbers&series_id=CES0000000001&output_view=net_1mth