Thanks for misrepresenting the facts Brent. The graph cearly says "The Bush and Obama Administrations" and unless I'm incorrect in my history, Obama took office on January 20, 2009, therefore the colors don't lie, but you do.
So it was in September when it became apparent that Obama was going to become the next president? I guess that was right when the banks crashed and Bush declared we needed to give the banks $700 billion no questions asked, to avoid economic meltdown? That obviously had nothing to do with job losses, but instead it was the fact that Obama was inching ahead of McCain ever since McCain said he needed to suspend his campaign to go get in the way of everyone in Washington dealing with the banking crisis. But just to clarify, the US takes over failed Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, Lehman goes bankrupt, AIG gets bailed out, and BoA buys out the sinking Merrill Lynch, and apparently everyone started cutting jobs by the hundereds of thousands only because Obama just inched ahead of McCain?
So if it was known that Obama was going to win as early as September, and that's when job losses shot up, how come then when Obama won the presidency in November,
only 50k more jobs were lost than were lost during October? So business owners decided to cut jobs only when it began pretty obvious Obama was "going" to win during the months of a systemic financial meltdown, but not when he actually WAS elected president? I mean, Obama just officially elected the next incoming president so obviously the best course of action, if you were a business owner, would have been to immediately just start laying off and firing people right and left, because afterall, the last time a democrat was in office 22.4 million jobs were created by the time he left office.
By December, the banks have had their $700 billion for two months already and are still not lending to anyone, most small businesses haven't got their credit freezes lifted, and Detroit is beginning to look like Falujah, but a heck of a lot of CEOs and executives got multi-million dollar bonus packages. Thank goodness Paulson made sure there was no oversight on that $700 billion we just threw down the toilet. Oh but Bush is still in office, so that reckless irresponsible waste of taxpayer money is understandable. By the end of the month
job losses shoot up to 630k for the month of December 2008. But this is probably just from the fact that Obama is about to take the oath of office in 20 days and as a Democrat he will raise everyone's taxes, even though he campaigned to lower taxes for the middle class and still to this day has not raised taxes on the middle class. Still, that's enough to make any business owner fire their entire work force. It's a good thing business owners waited two months after he was elected in November to really start the massive firings just to rub things in during the holiday season. Why are business owners so mean?
Unfortunately however, after 3 months of credit freezes, 110k businesses filed bankruptcies by the end of December, which as a result leads to something I like to call, "job losses". At this point business owners aren't firing anyone anymore because they don't actually have a business anymore. I suppose this was from the fact that Obama was about to enter the White House in less than a month, however it's not. This was the
10th month in a row that over 100k businesses filed bankruptcies for the month, and 2009 was the largest year for bankruptcies since 2005 when the bankruptcy laws were changed.
By the time job losses "bottomed out" at
741k by the end of January, the largest monthly job losses in 40 years, a week after Obama took office, monthly job losses have been steadily decreasing ever since,
mirroring the increasing monthly job losses that occured during the year before Bush left office. By this logic one could say, once Obama took office business owners started hiring again, and be factually correct. Although we're currently hovering near positive monthly job growth, in a month or two consistent monthly positive job growth numbers will stick and finally we'll see the unemployment rate really come down, as evidenced with the stabilization and small dips in the unemployment rate we have recently seen.