Right-wing attorney Bart DePalma has a comment on Paul Krugman's usual Monday masterpiece at the NY Times. (Meteor Blades already has an excerpt on the front page.) War in the comment threads is usually a waste of time, but DePalma was so dishonest, so innumerate, and thinks you are so gullible, it's worth visiting his errors in detail.
Gross Error One: Reagan once grew the economy by a million jobs in one month (so Obama's 200,000 months are puny). To see why this is not true, click on.
The million-job month is entirely an artifact of a large strike. When those 675,000 employees went on strike, their jobs were subtracted. When the strike was settled, the jobs were added back in. The first month job "growth" data (which was negative) and the second months' miraculous boom (cough!) average out to about 180,000—something Obama has attained many times.
Frankly, you should have realized that sustained million-jobs-a-month growth is ridiculous. That would mean that every year, about three entire birth cohorts of the USA gained employment. So not only did all the college seniors get jobs, and their friends who didn't go to college, also all the juniors and sophomores. By the third year of the fairy-tale boom, entire high schools would be entering the workforce.
But that wouldn't be enough for DePalma: he says to keep pace Obama should be adding 1.3 million to account for growth in population! This is Gross Error Two. He has this exactly backwards: Obama's economy does not need as many jobs as Reagan's, because of the baby boom.
In 1980, there were 4.0 million men and 4.6 million women aged 60-64, the group that was about to retire (See Figure 7). And many of the women, who were born before 1920, were not working outside the home. In contrast, there were 7.9 million young male Baby Boomers and 8.5 million young female Boomers, about half of whom would work outside the home, aged 20-24, entering the labor market.
In 2010, there were 17 million persons 21 to 24, and 16.8 million aged 60-64. (Table 1). Correcting for the missing 20 year olds [Dear Census people: very annoying that the summary is inconsistent in bracket size] would make about 21.2 million. Even allowing for continued growth in the participation of women, the difference between the entering cohort and retiring cohort is vastly smaller than in 1980. Ignoring the effect of women entering the workforce—which is in DePalma's favor since the bulk of this change happened before 1980—we have a difference in population of 7.8 million in 1980 and 4.4 million in 2010. In other words, to maintain employment levels, the economy needed to generate about 7 jobs in 1980 for every 4 in 2010.
Gross error three. Donald Trump and the cult of St. Ronnie like to present a graphic which DePalma incorporated from the goldbug crank-economics site Zero Hedge. It tracks Labor Force Participation rate: it went up from 1978 to 2000, with some flatness in the early 1990s, and has been falling pretty consistently since 2000, including under G.W. Bush, a point that passes unremarked. Attractive as it might be to claim the 1992-2000 period as a vindication of Bill Clinton, both the up and down sides of this parabola are the effect of the Boomers moving through the work force, rather like a pig going through a boa constrictor (the metaphor is old, not original to me). The lower number today is largely a function of more elderly, retired people. (I recommend the U5 and U6 unemployment rates for a fair way to look at the impact of part-time and discouraged workers. You won't see Trump doing that, though, because the picture isn't that bleak.)
What do you think happens to people who follow false economists like these? If they are individuals, they lose money. If they are nations, they trash their economy.
Bonus sidelight: Haven't even mentioned the huge growth of public-sector employment under St. Ronnie. With Obama being a victim of the Austerity Cult, there are still fewer public employees today than at the beginning of his first term. His job growth numbers are all the more remarkable for this: it's private sector jobs.
Now if only we can get the wages up!