President Obama has a new talking point for the campaign trail.
The situation on the nation's job front is probably better than initially thought, according to a new estimate by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A revision in the job growth numbers from the past year reveal that the economy added 386,000 more jobs than the previous estimate.
That means a net positive in job growth during the Obama presidency. The economy has now officially added more jobs since January 2009--when Obama was inaugurated--than it has lost.
"We lost more than 8 million jobs and GDP contracted by almost five percent as a result of the Great Recession," said Alan Krueger, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, on the White House blog.
"We have more work to do, but incorporating today's preliminary benchmark revision to the employment figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics with their earlier data indicates that the economy has added nearly 5.1 million private sector jobs, on net, over the past 30 months," he continued.
"BLS announced that total employment likely grew by 386,000 more jobs than previously announced during the 12 months from March 2011 to March 2012, and by 453,000 more private sector jobs in that same time period. In the past decade, the absolute difference between the preliminary and final benchmark revision has averaged 37,000 jobs."
Obama took office in the midst of a financial collapse. Nearly 2 million jobs were lost in the last months of the Bush presidency, and the losses continued unabated for the first five months of Obama's term.
Mitt Romney has been bashing the president on the campaign trail for those losses. Romney claims his own economic plan would add 12 million jobs.
Obama counters that Romney's math is off, and that job losses would have been far worse without government stimulus, an action Romney opposed at the time.
There has been a string of good economic news for the president lately. Jobless claims fell by 26,000 last week, their lowest levels since July. Consumer confidence hit a seven-month high, the best since February.
Still, the unemployment rate hovers just above 8 percent, though that is down from a high of 10 percent in October of 2009.
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