Obama Told America To Fact Check His “805,000 Manufacturing Jobs” Claim…So We Did

 

Trump has already saved/created jobs and he’s not even taken office yet. However, Obama’s White House slammed Trump for it saying, “There were 805,000 manufacturing jobs that weren’t just protected or saved, but actually created while President Obama was in office.”
–White House press secretary Josh Earnest, remarks at the daily briefing, Nov. 30, 2016

 From Washington Post:
Earnest made these remarks after reports emerged that President-elect Donald Trump had persuaded Carrier not to go through with plans to ship jobs making gas furnaces to Mexico. As we have noted before, Trump exaggerated the number of jobs he claimed to have saved; at the time of the briefing, Trump had claimed he had saved more than 1,000 jobs. (The real number was 730.)

Earnest asserted that if Trump had saved 1,000 jobs, he would need to do it 804 more times to “meet the record of manufacturing jobs that were created in the United States while President Obama was in office.”

But this is a cherry-picked number, as we have noted several times before.

THE FACTS

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States stood at 12.561 million in January 2009, when Obama became president. As of November, according to preliminary estimates, there were 12.26 million manufacturing jobs.

That’s a loss of 300,000 manufacturing jobs. So how does Earnest end up with a gain of more than 800,000?

Earnest is counting from when the low point in U.S. manufacturing was reached in February 2010, when there were just 11.453 million manufacturing jobs in the country. That was about 1.1 million fewer than when Obama took office — and nearly 2.3 million fewer than when the Great Recession officially began in December 2007.

So 807,000 jobs represents the number of jobs created since the low point in Obama’s term, not “while he was in office.” (Earnest made his comments before the November numbers were announced, so the figure changed from 805,000 to 807,000.)

http://www.proudcons.com/obama-told-america-to-fact-check-his-805000-manufacturing-jobs-claim-so-we-did/