Saint Ronald versus Barack the Destroyer

I’ve done a few comparisons of economic performance under Reagan and Obama, sometimes using the interactive data from the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank.

And I’ve done a few TV interviews on the same subject.

But something was very different in this interview on the Fox morning show. I was asked to respond to the Obama campaign’s assertion that Barack Obama’s policies created more private-sector jobs than Ronald Reagan’s policies.

I confess that I did the interview without first checking the numbers, and may not have been overly animated since I was in Denver and had to wake up before 4:00 a.m., but I felt confident enough to joke about an intern torturing data in the bowels of the White House.

But now that I’m back at my desk and I’ve had a chance to review the numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I can now say, with full confidence, that Stephanie Cutter must be smoking crack (she’s also smoking hot, but that’s a separate discussion).

And her intern should be fired.

Here are the numbers for private sector jobs (technically “Private wage and salary workers”), looking at the first 42 months in office for both Reagan and Obama. I’m including both seasonally adjusted and raw numbers, just to show that there’s no way to slice the data to justify Ms. Cutter’s assertion.

And here’s a look at the comparative performance of Reagan and Obama, based on the percent increase in private jobs in the first 31 months.

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I also looked at what would happen if agricultural and/or self-employed workers were added to the mix, but nothing changes. Reagan beats Obama with both hands tied behind his back.

And what makes these numbers even more stunning is that Obama took office in the middle of a downturn, so a lot of the job losses already had occurred. Reagan, by contrast, got hit with a recession after taking office. So even though I think that downturn can and should be blamed on Jimmy Carter, all of the job losses show up in Reagan’s column. Yet he still kicks the you-know-what out of Obama.

The lesson to draw from these numbers is that Presidents should reduce the burden of government if they want better economic performance. Saint Ronald understood this basic insight, but Barack the Destroyer somehow thinks America will be more prosperous if we mimic Europe’s welfare states.