Looking Out for Number One Percent

Great post, NOJO. And in the spirit of “great minds think alike” I’ve got a similar post coming up at 9:15 (right after a juicy “quote for the day” at 9:00) that takes a closer look at some of Romney’s fuzzy math on this very subject.

Before that, I think it’s worth noting that both of Romney’s most prominent campaign pronouncements concerning on job creation are based on lies or disingenuous misrepresentations. His account of his own record on job creation is bogus, and as you note, relies on absurd cherry picking. But his accusation that Barack Obama has lost 2,000,000 jobs is just as absurd. The president came into office in the midst of an economy that was in teh process of cratering. We were seeing some 750,000 job losses a month in the months immediately preceeding and following Obama’s inauguration. Tallying those losses in the Obama column is a purely fraudalent exercise, hardly any less dishonest than Rush Limbaugh’s pinning the recession on Obama before the president had even taken office. If you focus only on the period following the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, then you see a stabilization in the jobs market followed by nearly uninterrupted positive growth in private sector employment (with 200,0000 new jobs last month alone).

He’s Waldemort lite…

How many jobs did he destroy? Was it more or less than the McJobs he created?

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: Krugman describes Mitones’ fucked up math but doesn’t say how many were destroyed.

@Serolf Divad: I sometimes get annoyed at Steve Benen for being too Obama rah-rah, but I do enjoy his monthly jobs charts.

I worked on-campus library jobs during college and law school, often at the front desk. Highlights were figuring out how to game the all-campuses phone system so I could talk for free to my friends at other Univ of Calif campuses, and chasing the Reading Room Masterbator out of the Ed/Psych library.

By the way, does anyone know of a Collar for retail? There’s blue/white/pink, but retail isn’t any of those, and I couldn’t think of a clever designation.

@nojo:
No Collar… a Vest… a polyester Vest.

@Dodgerblue: I worked at the UT Austin campus bookstore for three semesters – but at the satellite store that catered to law, nursing and art students. Once I figured out where to locate Oil&Gas and the stethoscopes and figured out what the hell “guache” was, I scored like Dr J with an open lane.

@Nabisco: I had a buddy, an English major, who used to troll the BioMed Library wearing a white coat and stethoscope, picking up the sorority girls who were in turn trolling for med students.

@nojo: Red collar, for all the consumer debt it produces?

@Dodgerblue: I had a work study job at UNM’s Biomedical Communications Department. We used to go shoot pre-autopsy photos across the courtyard at the Office of the Medical Investigator. Not a lot of ladies rolled through that work place.

@Nabisco: And said satellite store was conveniently located near the excellent hangover curing diner Red River Cafe.

@mellbell: Not bad. Not bad at all.

Meanwhile, programming notice: New Hampshire open thread at 8pm ET, featuring Our Most Profoundly Lame Opening Gag Yet.

@nojo: Bill Pullman at the end of ID4?

@redmanlaw: Worse.

http://lawsoflife.co.uk/imhoffs-law/

Imhoff’s Law – The organisation of any bureaucracy is very much like a septic tank. The really big chunks always rise to the top.