Job Creation of record of post-WWII Presidents, Average Annual % Increases :

THE BELOW WAS CREATED IN EARLY FEBRUARY AT NEAR THE PEAK OF THE PRE-COVID ECONOMY. Even so, it shows that Trump was a less-than-median job creator even at his high point. Now, according to the latest jobs report that came out October 2, Trump has lost 3.907 Million jobs since January 2017 when Obama left office, whch comes to 89,000 jobs lost per month during these 44 months. This of course, puts Trump last in the table as the only post WW-II loser

(Sorted from best to worst by average annual percentage increase in jobs. Republicans in red, Democrats in blue.)

Notice that -- with the tiny exception (0.2% difference) of Nixon to Kennedy -- the worst Democrat has a better record than the best Republican -- that is, until Obama, who inherited an economy that was losing several hundred thousand jobs a month And actually, Kennedy did not have a chance to complete his term -- had he done so, and had he had the same job creation numbers in December 1963 through January 1965 as Johnson had (a 3.48%/year annualized rate of increase), he would have easily topped Nixon.

Post-WWII Presidents ranked by Average Annual Percentage Increase In Jobs (the last column):
. . (updated 2/7/20 after new jobs report released - it has revisions going back decades.)




THE ABOVE WAS CREATED IN EARLY FEBRUARY AT NEAR THE PEAK OF THE PRE-COVID ECONOMY. Even so, it shows that Trump was a less-than-median job creator even at his high point. Now, according to the latest jobs report that came out October 2, Trump has lost 3.907 Million jobs since January 2017 when Obama left office, whch comes to 89,000 jobs lost per month during these 44 months. This of course, puts Trump last in the table as the only post WW-II loser

(Actually, the true jobs peak of the Trump economy was in February 2020 -- he gained another 251,000 jobs in February, which would make his 37 month record at the end of February 184,054 jobs/month, which comes to 1.52% average annual increase in jobs -- only trivially better than the 182,194 and 1.50% numbers shown in the table (which are at the end of January), and certainly doesn't affect his ranking from what is shown in the table).

Remember, Obama inherited the deepest recession since World War II, which lost 4.2 million jobs in the last 10 months of his predecessor, and in the last 3 months of his predecessor was losing 753,000 jobs a month. With that momentum, job losses continued for the first 13 months of the Obama presidency -- through February 2010 -- totalling 4.3 million jobs lost during those 13 months.

Anyway, despite the 4.3 million jobs lost in his first 13 months because of the Bush crash, Obama still beats 4 of the last 7 post-WWII Republican presidents (the count of 7 post-WWII Republican presidents includes Trump). Of these Republican presidents, only Nixon, Reagan, and Ford had better records than Obama, and Ford only edged him out by 0.01 percentage points.

In the above table, the average annual % increase in jobs (the last column) is a much fairer way to compare presidents than just the raw job creation figures in thousands because the latter is unfair to the earlier presidents who were working with much smaller labor forces to begin with. For example the number of job holders at the beginning of Truman's administration was only 38% as many as at the beginning of Clinton's administration, and 31% as many as at the beginning of G.W. Bush's administration. So Truman's pathetic-looking 93,570 jobs/month creation record turns out to be even better than Clinton's 238,521 jobs/month record when adjusted for the size of the labor force at the beginning of their terms.

In raw thousands of jobs created per year, both Reagan and Nixon beat Truman. But when adjusted for the size of the labor force -- again, by looking at average annual percentage increases in jobs -- Truman beats them both.

Official sources of information for the above:

# Payroll Jobs: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001
# Monthly change of above: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth
# . . Hint: to see both of the above two together on the same page, go to http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001 and click on the "More Formatting Options" link in the upper right and check the "Original Data Value" and the "1-Month Net Change" checkboxes and click the "Retrieve Data" button halfway down the page on the left
# Private Sector Payroll Employment: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001
# Monthly change of above: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001?output_view=net_1mth
# . . Hint: to see both of the above two together on the same page, go to http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0500000001
and click on the "More Formatting Options" link in the upper right and check the "Original Data Value" and the "1-Month Net Change" checkboxes and click the "Retrieve Data" button halfway down the page on the left