Recently I had a discussion with an old friend who is an ardent George W. Bush hater and, as a result, will be voting for President Obama again, no matter what.
We were discussing the economy and I happened to mention that the average unemployment rate was much lower during Bush’s two terms despite the September 11, 2001 attacks. However, at that moment, I was not sure of the exact figures. So after a quick search, I found this handy chart that you can send to your unemployed or under-unemployed friends or any George W. Bush haters in general and ask them exactly what part of Bush’s unemployment rate history they still hate.
They might discover they actually miss President Bush after they read this chart from the Department of Labor – Bureau of Labor Statistics.
|
Year |
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Jul |
Aug |
Sep |
Oct |
Nov |
Dec |
|
|
2001 |
4.2 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.3 | 4.5 | 4.6 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.3 | 5.5 | 5.7 | |
|
2002 |
5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.8 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.7 | 5.9 | 6.0 | |
|
2003 |
5.8 | 5.9 | 5.9 | 6.0 | 6.1 | 6.3 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.0 | 5.8 | 5.7 | |
|
2004 |
5.7 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.6 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.4 | 5.4 | |
|
2005 |
5.3 | 5.4 | 5.2 | 5.2 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.9 | |
|
2006 |
4.7 | 4.8 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | |
|
2007 |
4.6 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.4 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 4.7 | 5.0 | |
|
2008 |
5.0 | 4.9 | 5.1 | 5.0 | 5.4 | 5.6 | 5.8 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 6.5 | 6.8 | 7.3 | |
|
2009 |
7.8 | 8.3 | 8.7 | 8.9 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.8 | 10.0 | 9.9 | 9.9 | |
|
2010 |
9.7 | 9.8 | 9.8 | 9.9 | 9.6 | 9.4 | 9.5 | 9.6 | 9.5 | 9.5 | 9.8 | 9.4 | |
|
2011 |
9.1 | 9.0 | 8.9 | 9.0 | 9.0 | 9.1 | 9.1 | 9.1 | 9.0 | 8.9 | 8.7 | 8.5 | |
|
2012 |
8.3 | 8.3 | 8.2 | 8.1 | 8.2 | 8.2 |
Here are the key findings from this chart to share with your friends.
When President Bush took office in January, 2001 the unemployment rate was 4.2%. After the jolt of the September 11,2001 attacks, the highest the unemployment rate rose was 6.3% in June, 2003.
This rate seems remarkably low by today’s economic standards.
Then the economy calmed down and actually grew, dropping the unemployment rate to the mid 5% range, where it stayed for the next two years.
In fact, the rate was 5.4% in November, 2004 when Bush was reelected.
Really good news came in December, 2005 when the unemployment rate dipped to 4.9% and stayed in the 4% range straight through to November, 2007.
Then in December, 2007 it went to 5.0%, rose slowly and really shot up in August, 2008 to 6.1%. When the economy tanked, the rate blew right through the 6% range ending December, 2008 at 7.3%.
Rising still in January, 2009 when President Obama took office, the rate was 7.8%.
It saw a high of 10% in October, 2009 and now in July, 2012 the rate has come down to 8.2% where it seems to be stuck in what I call, “the new normal” for this president.
The takeaway here is the highest unemployment rate during President Bush’s entire eight years in office was his last at 7.8%, compared to President Obama’s low of 8.1%.
It is ironic how Obama still loves to blame the “economy he inherited” from Bush, when at this point in the presidential election campaign, Obama would love to have the 7.8% unemployment rate he did in fact inherit from Bush in January, 2009 or better yet the 6.8% from November, 2008 when he was elected.
As a follow up, I will email this chart to my dear old friend from college and look forward to some of his snarky comments in return. But since he lives in California, his vote for Obama will not affect the election outcome. It’s my Bush hating friends in Ohio and Virginia I really need to work on. And if you have some as well, please forward them this chart.
Mail it, but don’t expect it to have any results. These folks have turned off the cognitive center of their brain and are operating on Obamautomatic.
Great facts there, but can I suggest that someone turn this table into an actual chart (graph)? That probably won’t help people who will not see, but it certainly can help those who are merely innumerate, and who need info in a form they can grok.
Here is a graph of the data you requested and a working link to all the data.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
Well-meaning idea, to send my Bush-hating friends this chart, but they are incapable of reading it. All those numbers will make their eyes glaze over and give them a terrible headache. This in turn will cause them to lash out and calim that I subjected them to an evil Teabagger trick.
There are three kinds of people:
Those who can do math and those who can’t.
(That’s a, I say…that’s a JOKE, son. Look at me when I’m talkin’ to ya, boy!)
There are 10 kinds of people:
Those who understand binary and those who don’t.
Yet during all that time of essentially full employment, anything under 6% is full employment, the communists, excuse me, Democrats and the lickspittle media kept up a drumbeat of “worst economy since the Great Depression,” and the idiots believed it.
Remember how we were told that under Bush 5% was a jobless recovery and $2.45 a gallon was “pain at the pump”? Yeah, me neither, but I’m pretty sure that stories of 8% jobless nonrecoveries ad $3.45 gallon burdensome gas pricess will be just around the corner.
$3.45 a gallon, aren’t you an optimist? Haven’t seen anything that low in Obama’s “home” state for a year. More likely $4.35 or $5.43.
I know, it was Reagans fault.
Those Bush-Hating-Will-Vote-for-Obama-No-Matter-What ‘friends’ will just go -
LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa(pause briefly to take breath)LaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLaLa
It is beyond any point of showing them charts.
Thank you for these stats. Very illuminating.
I’m not a Bush supporter, but definitely not an Obama supporter. It’s just that after the ’92 election, I refused to continue being part of the problem by supporting the GOP candidates. I was sorely tempted to vote for GWB in the 2000 election because he talked a pretty good conservative game during the campaign. But in the end I voted libertarian.
The BLS unemployment statistics don’t mean anything to me. What matters to me is the huge increase in social security and medicare spending that occurred under both GWB and BHO. I’m self-employed and federal self-employemnt taxes have cost me dearly. We need someone with the guts to privatize both social security and medicare.
It doesn’t do any good to talk about data with obama supporters. The few who are capable of understanding, don’t care. They made their minds up because of some emotional reason long ago, and it doesn’t matter what the menace does, they are sticking with him. So if you mention data, they will simply deny it and call you a racist.
If I was a bigwig in the Republican party, I would buy an hour show every week on BET and let Alan West do whatever he wanted to do. That would probably move a couple of % points of the black vote to Romney.
White liberals are more hopeless. They have too much invested, in every way conceivable, in obama to give it up.
If I was a bigwig, I’d ignore any libwit over 25 and just hammer one message home to the young ones. You are going to be a serf for the rest of your life if you vote for obama, because if you seriously think the gubamint is going to give you drugs, food, iphones and spending money for the rest of your life, you’re cazy. Romney wants everybody to succeed. Like him or hate him, he’s your only hope.
I think that before we can say whether or not Obama’s plan worked we must define our terms.
Obama said he doesn’t want America to be exceptional and that he doesn’t want Americans to consider our country as being better than any other country. He wants to bring America down to the level of other countries.
We need to stop thinking that Obama means the same thing that we mean when he says his programs have worked or were successful. We must define certain terms. Terms like “success” or “that the policy worked”.
So, if we look at the goals Obama has set for America: that we should no longer be better than any other country, that we suck up up Islam, that America should not be a great power, that we not pursue “victory” in Afghanistan because the concept of “victory” makes him uncomfortable, and on and on … .
If we look at HIS goals I think one could honestly say that his policies have been working. In fact, they have been pretty darn successful.
Slider. You can blame me for the disasterous Clinton Admn. Because I arrogantly voted libertarian ,to my everlasting shame. i stupidly got on my high horse, and voted that way, because I didn’t,t think GHW Bush was consertive enough. it is one of my great regrets, that I betrayed my conservative values, to prove the point, that I was an idiot.
This is excellent work. Bravo!
Anyone reading ‘The Hill’ and remarks by detractors in its “comments” section, will soon realize there is a “talking points memo” circulating around individuals posting seemingly identical statements on several different articles… just are all alike! Even when they call in to talk radio!!!!
Mostly, these detractors (We The People suspect they’re of one party)have one main drum beat “Obama can do no wrong, Obama is America’s answer to it’s ills, Obama has America’s best interest in mind, Obama is trying very hard against all odds that are deliberately stacked against him, Obama needs more time to completely implement his vision for America.”
These are all detractors; their thoughts, words and deeds as regards everything Obama are all alike. Show them anything (data, charts, historical data, numbers, etc.) or any reasonable, concrete researched information, they’ll quickly dismiss it as false, irrelevant, just not strong enough.
For example, try this out, go show this chart to Bill Mahr or even Roseann Barr or Arianna Huffington. Bet their reaction will be “Ho-Hum, so what?”
Nope! The answer is to vote massively this November 6. If at all possible, take five friends with each of us to our polling precints. Massive fraud as never seen before in the USA is currently underway. Examples:
Electorate manipulation(Obama offering expanded welfare as well as to Latinos)
Manipulation of demography (Re-districting)
Disenfranchisement
Intimidation (New Black Panthers, SEIU, AFL-CIO,et al)
Vote buying (“Obama Money”)
Misinformation (MoveOn.org, Code Pink, La Raza, Priorities, etc.)
Misleading or confusing ballot papers(Florida 2000 and 2008 elections)
Ballot stuffing(New Mexico and Virginia)
Misrecording of votes (possibly in Barcelona, Spain?)
Misuse of proxy votes
Destruction or invalidation of ballots(overseas and absentee ballots)
Tampering with electronic voting machines (SEIU-Nevada 2010)
There’s more fraud underway but these are the main, immediate ones.
God Save America. Amen.
It’s a good thing there wasn’t any Fraud in the Bush vs. Gore election.
The one state that decided which way the supreme court would lean, and your brother is the Governor ? Come on. THINK. You can’t rewrite history. And his is already self- explanatory.
You’re right, there WASN’T any fraud in that election. The dimocrats spend millions on investigations trying to unearth fraud and got slammed each time.
Time to get over it.
I second the motion of messup and trumpet his/her post with a big OORAH!
But consider this as well.
Obama’s 8.3 % is not a comparable percentage to Bush’s 6.8 % since they measured different numbers and proportions. If they measured the same percentage of healthy adults willing to work for a decent wage not influenced by the availability of free money from unemployment, food stamps, disability, welfare and like payments, financed at an unsustainable level by a bankrupt government borrowing from foreign elites intent on destroying us, then the percentage difference would be much higher, say closer to a 10-15% difference.
This would put Obama’s comparable unemployment rate, apples to apples (without reference to the hopeless or to those induced by free money borrowed by others to stop looking) at closer to 15% to 20% of otherwise employable adults.
Anyway, Obama’s rate comes from the Administration of the current president and, when it comes to economic facts coming from those people, I do not believe they are interested, informed, sufficiently intelligent, serious, sufficiently scientific or rigorous or honest enough to be relied upon to be honest or accurate. So how can we be sure they know what they’re talking about, or even want to know what they’re talking about, much less have any scruples against telling us bald-faced lies to keep themselves in power, and to keep us from knowing how incompetent, nay, uncaring, they really are?
What I would really like is the have the 4.4% Unemployment that Senator Obama and the Democrats inherited when they took over both houses of Congress in January 2007. Bush vetoed what, one of their bills?
Notice that the unemployment rate went up BEFORE Obama was even elected. However, on the other hand, unemployment rose significantly AFTER the Democrats raised the minimum wage….
Don’t forget, many employers laid people off shortly after Barry was elected in order to get leaner because they were anticipating what was coming in the way of taxes and regulations.
And he did not disappoint.
Those numbers represent $. We all know, that’s what gets peoples attention. But the ” Crawford Clown ” brought some #’s to THOUSANDS of American Military Families unnessessarilly.For you folks who beleive in him, what number do you put on a loved ones life ? You cannot look at his already written history and legacy and think anything but complete FALIURE.
Do you have similar figures for GDP over the same time period?
Here is the GDP data you asked for.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth