Barrack Obama Tells Another Whopper—–He Did Not Create 12.8 Million Jobs | David Stockman's Contra Corner

Barrack Obama Tells Another Whopper—–He Did Not Create 12.8 Million Jobs | David Stockman's Contra Corner:
America is better off when President Obama is out on the stump bloviating and boasting rather than in Washington actively doing harm.
But the whoppers he just told the students at the University of Wisconsin are beyond the pale.
Said our spinmeister-in-chief:
 "And the unemployment rate is now down to 5.3 percent. (Applause.) Keep in mind, when I came into office it was hovering around 10 percent. All told, we’ve now seen 64 straight months of private sector job growth, which is a new record — (applause) — new record — 12.8 million new jobs all told."
That’s a pack of context-free factoids.
There is still such a thing as the business cycle, and only economically illiterate hacks—-like those who work on the White House speech writing staff—-would measure anything from an all-time momentary bottom that happened to occur during Obama’s second year in office.
What counts is not that we’ve had a bounce after a terrible bust, but where we are now on a trend basis.
The answer is absolutely nowhere!
We are now 29 quarters from the pre-crisis peak and total non-farm labor hours utilized by the US economy are no higher than they were in Q4 2007. 
In other words, if you use a common unit of measure—–labor hours rather than job slots which treat coal-miners and part-time pizza delivery boys alike—–there have been no new units of employment at all. 
...In short, we have gone through two business cycles and have essentially added zero new employment inputs to the US economy.
And that marks a sharp and devastating reversal of previous trends.
In fact, the BLS’ own data convey an out-and-out crisis that the President should have been lamenting, not a cherry-picked simulacrum of growth based on born again jobs slots.
...When you get right down to it, however, even labor hours do not fully capture the actual jobs disaster happening in America.

That’s because we keep shedding high productivity hours in the full-time  jobs sector in favor of lower skill, low pay gigs in bars, restaurants, Wal-Marts and temp agencies.

So notwithstanding another month of 200,000 plus headline job gains, here’s where we actually are.
The number of breadwinner jobs—–full-time positions in energy and mining, construction, manufacturing, the white collar professions, information technology, transportation/distribution and finance, insurance and real estate—-is still 1.7 million below the level of December 2007; in fact, it is still lower than it was at the turn of the century