Thursday, September 6, 2012

Fibbing With GM Job Creation Statistics, Bill Clinton Edition

From Bill Clinton‘s Democratic National Convention speech, September 5, 2012

“Now there are 250,000 more people working in the auto industry than the day the companies were restructured. Governor Romney opposed the plan to save GM and Chrysler. So here’s another jobs score: Obama two hundred and fifty thousand, Romney, zero.” Wild applause.
Clinton attributes the 250,000 new jobs created to domestic and foreign auto manufacturers, parts suppliers, and dealers located in the United States to the Obama-directed bankruptcy of General Motors. Without the President’s bold and decisive action, these quarter million new jobs would not exist, and U.S. manufacturing would not have been “saved.”

Clinton gets his figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows that U.S. auto manufacturers (both domestic and foreign owned) employed 624,400 at the time of the bankruptcy (June 2009) and now employ 789,500 — an increase of 165,100 jobs. Auto dealers employed 1,009,700 in June 2009 and 1,081,200 today — a gain of 71,500 jobs.  The two gains add up to 236,600 jobs (Clinton’s 250,000).
Sorry, President Clinton. There is no way you can you attribute the 236,600 job gain to the General Motors bailout. According to the carmaker’s annual report, GM North America employed 70,000 in the United States in June of 2009 (the rest were in Canada and Mexico) and 74,500 today, for a net gain of 4,500 jobs. Of the auto manufacturing job increases, GM accounts for only two percent.

go to forbes.com

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