Obama's Final Year Economic Fact Check Shows He Did Absolutely Nothing to Improve the Economy, Skyrocketing Unemployment

If this morning’s employment report has you down, just listen to President Obama. The U.S. economy is gorgeous, he insists.



“In the United States, our economy is growing again,” Obama crowed during his trip to Germany last month. And the American people would appreciate all of this “if we had been able to more effectively communicate all the steps we had taken” to improve it, he recently told one news outlet.




“It is very hard to get good stories placed” about the economy, Obama whined to college journalists last week. “People will assign you stories about what’s not working. It’s very hard for you to write a story about, ‘Wow, this thing really works good.’”



That grammatical gaffe aside, a failure to communicate is not among Obama’s myriad weaknesses.



As his self-confident and hilarious appearance at last Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner confirmed, Obama is a gifted speaker. The national media have eaten out of his hand since he descended from the heavens, fully formed, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. As president, he can summon two dozen TV cameras and just as many microphones just by crawling out of bed every morning. So, the notion that Obama cannot express his economic message “good” deeply insults the intelligence of the American people.



While Obama can talk the bark off a banyan tree, he cannot make Americans hallucinate prosperity. Here is the sad picture they actually see.



The unemployment rate has improved significantly, from 7.8 percent at Obama’s January 20, 2009, inauguration to 5.0 percent in April.



However, as more and more Americans stop looking for work, the Labor Force Participation Rate on Obama’s watch has fallen from 65.7 percent to 62.8 percent, a level last measured before Obama in March 1978. Since Obama took office, this metric has slid 4.1 percent.



Last month saw the creation of 160,000 jobs, a widely panned number, and much below the 200,000-plus jobs generated in five of the last six months. Nothing about the latest employment report spells “boom.”



Meanwhile, annualized GDP growth nearly stalled in the first quarter at a meager 0.5 percent. This is down from already tepid 1.4 percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2015.



Obama is the only U.S. chief executive in history not to preside over even a single year with 3 percent GDP growth, as the Institute for Policy Innovation’s Tom Giovanetti observes:



‘From 1790 to 2000, U.S. real GDP growth averaged 3.79 percent,’ entrepreneur Louis Woodhill explained at RealClearMarkets. He expects final figures to show that ‘2015 will have been the tenth year in a row that real GDP growth came in at under 3.0 percent.’



During the Obama years, the number of Americans below the poverty line is up 3.5 percent.



Real median household income: down 2.3 percent.



Americans on Food Stamps — 33 million then, 46 million now: up 39.5 percent.



Americans who own homes: down 5.6 percent.



National debt — $10.63 trillion then vs. $19.19 trillion last Wednesday: up 80.5 percent.