Looking Deeper At Sean Hannity’s Love Affair with Reagan
August 8, 2010 by Brian Kurtz
Filed under General
On a more-than-daily basis on his radio show, Sean Hannity uses Ronald Reagan’s jobs numbers as part of an argument for returning to Reagan’s economic policies. “Ronald Reagan lowered taxes and created 21 million jobs.” For years, I’ve accepted this claim as proof that Reagan’s policies, say whatever else you might about them, were great for jobs.
Then I decided to look at the numbers. I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and looked at the actual jobs numbers. The site is really pretty great for getting primary data, letting you get just about any data you’d want relating to jobs numbers since 1948. But anyway, back to Reagan. To connect “Reagan” and “21 million jobs” using Seasonally Adjusted numbers (the non-adjusted numbers aren’t significantly different), it appears that Hannity is counting the four Bush I years to get to 20.4 million over the 12 years from January 1981 (108,026,000 jobs) to January 1993 (128,400,000 jobs). During Reagan’s actual presidency, employment went up by 15.4 million, but I’m not against counting Bush’s numbers, as his term was essentially Reagan III. I’m also not going to begrudge Hannity for rounding 20.4 million up to 21 million, so the man is telling the truth. Good for him.
But, with all the jobs numbers since 1948 at our fingertips, we can put 21 million jobs in 12 years into some historical context. For example, how did the jobs market do in the 12 years after Clinton took over? Starting from the 128,400,000 jobs when Bush left, 12 years later there were 148,029,000 jobs. That means that there were 19.6 million jobs created. Which is for all intents and purposes just about equal to Reagan’s performance. And that 12 year block started with the huge Clinton tax increase.
What about the 12 years before Reagan took over? As previously discussed, when Reagan took over in January 1981, there were 108,026,000 jobs. 12 years prior, immediately after LBJ’s Great Society, there were 79,523,000 jobs, meaning that in the 12 years before Reagan’s 20.4 million jobs period, there were 28.5 million jobs created. And that started with Nixon, whose economic policies favored printing lots of money, wage and price controls, and an employer mandate for health insurance, putting him to the left of Obama. Reagan himself built a campaign on how Ford isn’t conservative enough, so he doesn’t get any credit for the better-than-Reagan job growth. And of course, no good Conservative/Libertarian would give Carter any credit for the massive jobs growth.
So we’re left with the conclusion, with Reagan’s jobs growth being not significantly better than the next era, and being in fact much worse than the preceding era, that Reagan’s policies haven’t proven to be particularly good for jobs growth. So why is it that Hannity and other conservatives think that a return to Reaganism offers a clear, proven path back to prosperity? The facts just don’t agree.
tldr: Employment growth under Reagan wasn’t all that great, so let’s stop talking about how great his policies were and how we need to go back to them.
Reprinted from: Reddit