Talking Points Memo:
One claim Republicans make to support their proposition that the country’s worse off than it was “four years ago” is that there are fewer jobs in America today than there were when President Obama took office.
“[H]e hasn’t created one single net new job since he’s been president,” Mitt Romney’s spokeswoman Andrea Saul said on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon.
The keys here are the words “net” and “since he’s been president.” And by that extremely narrow and literal reading, the claim is true — there are fewer net jobs in the country today than there were on the day Obama took office...
Of course, the problem here is that there are a lot of job losses that the president shouldn't take the blame for. As he took the Oath of Office, job numbers were crashing at a terrifying rate -- are those losses Obama's fault or Bush's? As is always the case, we'll stop blaming Bush for things like that when they stop being Bush's fault. In fact, as Steve Benen points out, one prominent Republican had previously argued that Obama shouldn't be blamed for those losses...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]
