(Thomas Mitchell/4TH ST8) While putting Barack Obama’s name into nomination at the Democratic convention last night, former President Bill Clinton said:
“I want to nominate a man whose own life has known its fair share of adversity and uncertainty. A man who ran for President to change the course of an already weak economy and then just six weeks before the election, saw it suffer the biggest collapse since the Great Depression. A man who stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery, knowing all the while that no matter how many jobs were created and saved, there were still millions more waiting, trying to feed their children and keep their hopes alive.”
Let’s put that one down as what we in Nevada like to call a bald-faced lie.
As Larry Elder points out — based on the stats that mean the most to the average citizen, unemployment, inflation and interest rates — the recession of 1981-82 was worse than the one Obama inherited. In the early 1980s unemployment reached 10.8 percent, inflation was a devastating 13.5 percent, and prime interest rates reached 21.5 percent — why I was renting and not buying. Obama was handed a “Great Recession” in which unemployment peaked at 10.2 unemployment, inflation was 5.6 percent and and the prime was 7.25 percent.
Ronald Reagan was the one who faced that 1980s recession.
How did his recovery compare to Obama’s?
Conn Carroll, writing for the Examiner in August, noted that, while Obama supporters like to brag about creating 4.5 million jobs, that the Reagan job recovery was much, much better.
In fact, Carroll observes, “There were 133.56 million total jobs when he (Obama) was inaugurated and there are just 133.24 total jobs today.”
In the 28 months after Reagan’s inauguration, the economy added 61.4 million private sector jobs.
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