Nancy Pelosi
The statement:
More private-sector jobs were created in the second year of the Obama administration than in the eight years of the Bush administration.
U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., during an interview Sept. 17 on MSNBC’s “Up with Chris Hayes.”
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During an appearance Sept. 17 on MSNBC’s “Up with Chris Hayes,” U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., defended job creation during President Barack Obama’s tenure.
“When President [George W.] Bush was president for those eight years with those tax policies, we lost jobs,” Pelosi said. “In fact, more jobs were created in the second year — that would be last year — in the private sector in the Obama administration than in the eight years of the Bush administration. And they want us to repeat those tax cuts at the high end which, again, did not create jobs, but they did deepen the deficit.”
It’s a variation of a talking point we have checked twice in the past year. Before we rule on Pelosi’s current iteration, we’ll review how we rated the earlier statements.
In October 2010, during an interview on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” Pelosi said, “More private-sector jobs were created in the first eight months of 2010 than in the eight years of the Bush administration.” We found data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that 653,000 private-sector jobs were lost on Bush’s watch, which ran from January 2001 to January 2009.
That made it easy for Pelosi: If the United States had netted even one private-sector job in 2010, she’d be accurate. And the nation actually did quite better, adding 777,000 private-sector jobs by September 2010. (The numbers here are sightly different from what we reported in our original item, due to revisions by the BLS.)
But we noted at the time that Pelosi had cherry-picked the data, choosing a time frame favorable to Obama. If she’d instead chosen to start from the beginning of Obama’s term — rather than halfway through his first two years — she would have been stuck with a net loss of 3.4 million private-sector jobs.
Meanwhile, the start and end points she used for Bush give him no such break. The jobs picture under Bush generally headed upward through mid-2007 before falling again. If she had used only the upward portion of the arc, as she did for Obama, it would have showed a gain of roughly 4 million private-sector jobs.
We gave Pelosi’s October 2010 statement a rating of Half True — right on the numbers, but misleading due to cherry-picking.
Pelosi earned a lower rating during a May 16 interview on Bloomberg television because she misstated a portion of the talking point.
“In the first year of the Obama administration, more jobs were created in the private sector than in the eight years of the Bush administration, with all of the tax cuts that President Bush had.” In reality, the first year of the Obama administration — January 2009 through January 2010 — saw the economy shed almost 4.2 million private-sector jobs.
So while job growth under Bush was anemic, it was still better than the 4.2 million jobs lost under Obama. We rated the claim False.
Pelosi continued cherry-picking last weekend when she cited numbers only for jobs created in 2010.
Using the period January 2010 to December 2010, the number of private-sector jobs increased by more than 1.2 million. If Pelosi had used more current numbers, she actually would have had a stronger case: From January 2010 to August 2011, the increase in jobs was almost twice as big — nearly 2.4 million.
Even the smaller of these two numbers beats Bush’s eight-year jobs increase — but she continues to conveniently ignore Obama’s first year in office. If you take the entirety of Obama’s term — January 2009 to August 2011 — the nation has lost 1.8 million jobs, which is still worse than what happened under Bush.
Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami said it’s proper to omit Obama’s first year.
“Republicans may wish to wipe the slate clean and forget about the financial crisis that nearly destroyed our economy and the recession that began under President Bush,” Elshami said. “The figures are correct and clearly demonstrate that private-sector jobs are being created, but not fast enough.”
We understand the impulse to make such adjustments, but in Pelosi’s formulation, this principle is applied unequally. If the first year of the Bush administration, which also included a recession, were excluded from her calculation, this would have magically erased a loss of 2.4 million jobs under Bush. The next seven years of the Bush presidency would have shown a gain of nearly 1.8 million jobs.
Interestingly, if Pelosi had started the count for each president at the beginning of the second year of their presidencies, it would not only have been more defensible methodologically, it would have strengthened Pelosi’s argument. Under those terms, private-sector job growth under Obama would have been 2.4 million, compared with 1.8 million under Bush.
For her general point, we give Pelosi some credit. For her methodological sins, we give her a thumbs down. We rate her statement Half True.
This article was edited for length. To see a complete version and its sources, go to www.politifact.com /truth-o-meter/statements/2011 /sep/20/nancy-pelosi/nancy-pelosi -says-jobs-increased-faster-2010 -8-yea/.
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