Hot Air has grappled with the substance of my essay for which I am grateful. Let me first address Karl's point on jobs. I wrote:
Since [the beginning of 2010], the U.S. has added 2.4 million jobs. That’s not enough, but it’s far better than what Romney would have you believe, and more than the net jobs created under the entire Bush administration.
Karl says it's not fair to compare Obama's post 2009 job gains with Bush's net job gains. McArdle echoes by saying I'm "puffing up Obama's record by comparing gross to net":
An economist who arbitrarily decided to start a job count comparison at the beginning of one president's term, and in the middle of another's, would be laughed out of peer review; a freshman who turned in such work would flunk the assignment. Whether or not Andrew intended to do so, he is cherry-picking, and as a result, the comparison is worthless.
It wasn't my main point in the passage cited, but it's a fair argument. So let's unpack the Bush and Obama record on job creation. Krugman had two very helpful graphs of total employment under Bush and Obama recently. Here's Obama's record:
As Krugman notes:
Does this look to you like a president who “lost jobs”, or like a president who inherited an economy in free fall? You can accuse Obama of not doing enough to promote recovery — and I have (although the biggest villain here was Romney’s own party). But to claim that Obama caused the job loss is indefensible.
Here's Bush's, again with the recession shaded:
If you just look at the first terms, Bush's job growth, after his mild recession, was more anemic than Obama's after his near-death experience in the first month of his presidency. Of course, the sheer depth of Obama's recession made the possibility of a sharp recovery higher. But recessions caused by crises in the financial sector tend to be deeper and take longer to recover from.
Nonetheless, at this point in their respective terms, Obama's job creation after his recession beats Bush's after his. Indeed, Bush's tax cuts gave us no long term acceleration in growth or employment. But they did turn a fragile surplus into the worst debt since the Second World War – a debt the GOP now blames entirely on Obama!
The Dish 