Mitt Romney is wrong again.
Mitt Romney, the Republican GOP Candidate for President, and supporter like Real Estate And Media Entrepreneur Donald Trump have talked a lot about claims that it’s President Obama and the Democrats who have waged a ‘war on women’ and not the Republicans, and trot out the idea that 766,000 more women are unemployed than when President Obama took office.
I saw this Twitter tweet by Donald Trump…
The real war on women. Under @BarackObama 766,000 more women are unemployed from when he took office bit.ly/LefGXr
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2012
… and just plain had it with this crap, so I went to the BLS.gov website, and looked for the actual unemployment numbers for women from 2009 to the most recent month this year 2012, May. Then I went to work in building a spreadsheet, which was helped by the fact that the BLS.gov site allows one to make a .xls file with the press of a link.
Here are the numbers, in thousands, with the first column on the left representing the year.
2009 5005 5294 5468 5500 5785 6004 5976 5977 6062 6218 6164 6239
2010 6075 6178 6215 6332 6314 5957 6116 6174 6116 6312 6460 6191
2011 6100 6067 5977 6045 6090 6101 6084 6103 6190 6052 5957 5959
2012 5977 5960 5863 5773 5771
Remember, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump and other GOP folks who are trying to bend the truth say that conditions are worse for women since Obama took office. Well, since the data presented is on a monthly basis, we have to discount January 2009, since the Inauguration was on January 20th 2009. That means we have February 2009 to start with.
That difference in data start date points to the main problem with the article Trump linked to. It uses January 2009 as the start month, which I’ve said is wrong to do because in point of fact President Obama had not really moved into the White House until the last week of January. But get this, each month after that the number of unemployed women grew until by May of 2009 the total number was greater than that for May of 2012. Not hard to figure out why Romney and the GOP didn’t start there. It also underscores how weak their case is.
The logical process is not to take a snap shot, or to try and count total numbers of women adding all months, because that’s dishonest – your will come up with more women now than then doing that, and the only way to avoid such an outcome is for no women to be unemployed at all from February 2009 to May 2012. That’s impossible, and the dispute of the start date of the data measurement totally discredits the Romney, Trump, GOP argument that 766,000 more women are unemployed now than “when Obama took office” because they got that wrong – it’s paper tiger math.
So the best alternative is to come up with a per-year-monthly average number for each year (remember each number in the thousands): 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. That’s what I did, and came up with this using the simple math of averages: 2009: 5,880.64, 2010:6,203.33, 2011:6,060.42, and 2012:5,868.80.
The difference? 11,000.84 more for 2009’s average than for 2012’s average. Or to put it simply, there were more women unemployed on average per month in 2009 than there have been in 2012.
But that does not tell the real story. The real story is in how the average number kicked up as the aftermath of the Setember 18th 2008 Crash set in, and by 2010, the average was in the six million level per month. But then, starting in 2011, the number started to decrease, and by November of 2011, went back under six million. And in 2010 we could see the impact of the economic stimulus package making summertime dents in the average, then in November 2010 the first dramatic decrease in the number of unemployed women.
This obvious reversal in the monthly growth in the average number of unemployed women has to cause us to wonder where we would be without the Economic Stimulus Package – clearly worse off.
The Economic Stimulus Package worked and helped women get jobs at a time when private investment was on the wane. Now the per month unemployment average for women is lower than in 2009, and the GOP is just plain wrong about Obama and the American Economy.
And Mr. Trump should learn to crunch numbers.
Stay tuned.