With President Obama's 2015 State of the Union address now upon us, we thought we'd follow up on a 2011 post, which showed that the post-recession jobs recovery in the U.S. wasn't quite as good as claimed by the President's political supporters in the U.S. Congress.
Specifically, those supporters were claiming that the jobs recovery under President Obama were faster than those seen during the 1990 and 2001 recessions. Here's the chart we featured to show how things really stood at that time:
The jobs recovery from the 2007 recession was still a work in progress however, and in January 2011, even though it was the worst on record, it really wasn't too far out of sync with the typical payroll jobs recovery seen in every recession since the end of World War 2, where the typical recovery in jobs takes approximately the same number of months as it did for the maximum job loss to occur during each period of economic contraction.
Let's next reveal how the total nonfarm jobs recovery following the 2007 recession really played out.
Unlike every other recession since the end of World War 2, the jobs recovery from the 2007 recession was especially protracted, making it an atypical event, but also an asymmetric one.
That outcome is a direct result of the policies that were adopted during President Obama's tenure in office, particularly those that were implemented after 2010 through the President's phone and his pen, the net effect of which was to derail the jobs recovery from even coming anywhere close to following the typical pattern seen after every other recession in the modern era.
Which is why we call the recovery following the 2007 recession the worst recession jobs recovery ever.