Obama is in the Green on Job Creation

September Reports brought some unexpected good news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the government agency that tracks all things jobs-related. During a scheduled review of its data, it determined that the economy had added hundreds of thousands more jobs than previously thought.

While getting overly fixated on individual jobs reports is unwise, this finding carries a special significance. This means that President Obama has now replaced all of the jobs lost early in his presidency — 800,000 jobs a month were being lost when he came into office — and is now in overall positive job creation territory. His leadership and policies have created a total of 868,000 new private sector jobs, which makes for 125,000 net new jobs once the loss of state and local government jobs killed by the Republican austerity is figured in.

ThinkProgress’ Pat Garafalo explains:

According to new revisions released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy created 386,000 more jobs between March 2011 and March 2012 than shown by previous estimates. As economist Justin Wolfers noted, this means that President Obama is now net positivefor job creation over his term in office, even taking into account the massive losses in January 2009:

The BLS benchmark revisions means that there has been a net jobs gain since Jan ’09. Romney can no longer talk about job losses under Obama.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) September 27, 2012

BLS Benchmark revisions mean that over the year to March 2012, the economy was adding 194k jobs per month, not 162k as previously thought.

— Justin Wolfers (@justinwolfers) September 27, 2012

The Economist’s Greg Ip noted that the revisions mean that Obama’s net job creation number is now 125,000:

Incorporating today’s BLS revision, net payroll growth over Obama’s term would move from -261K to +125K.

— Greg Ip (@greg_ip) September 27, 2012

The new numbers — which are based off of unemployment insurance reports that employers submit to the federal government — show that 453,000 more private sector jobs were created than shown by previous estimates, meaning Obama’s net private sector job creation total is now 868,000. Government jobs, meanwhile, shrank by an additional 67,000.

It’s also worth noting that Obama has already produced more new private sector jobs than his predecessor, George W. Bush. Bush ended both his first and second terms in the hole in terms of private sector job creation. Only significant increases in government employment allowed him to eek out a small overall net gain by the end of his two terms in office.

BOTTOM LINE: Ahead of next week’s critical first presidential debate, today’s news deprives Mitt Romney of one of his most frequently used talking points: that Obama has created no new jobs. While that talking point was always highly misleading at best, it is now a lie by any measure.