Jack Welch was wrong that the BLS fixed the job #s. But so what? He was right on the key point: there is no way in HELL that the economy produced 873,000 jobs, as per the Household Survey. Ordinary people know this, and all the pundits who argued about whether the BLS fixed the # missed the point: the number does not reflect people’s experience. If the economy really produced 873K jobs, it’d be the start of a boom. It’s not, and everyone knows it’s not. To ordinary people, that number is a LIE, and it does not matter if it was fixed, or if it is a statistical artifact.
Obama is unpopular. Very unpopular. If Romney wasn’t a horrible candidate, largely because he has to pander to the crazies in the Republican party, he’d be toast. The reason Obama is a lousy candidate is that the economy is trash. In absolute numbers, jobs have not recovered. In relative terms, they aren’t even close. 93% of all gains in the economy have gone to the top 1%.
The US economy, if you are an ordinary person, is trash. It has never recovered. Given Obama’s policies, it will not recover. The same is true of Romney, who is promising an economic apocalypse, but people already know that Obama is a failure. Romney might be worse, but they might decide to take a chance on him anyway, knowing that the status quo is permanent stagnation.
Ordinary people have seen their wealth crash, their wages decline, and the number of jobs available dive. Because the job market is so horrible, bosses are free to treat work like trash, so their jobs are much more unpleasant than they were.
This is a direct result of Obama’s policies. It was predictable, it was predicted. He is responsible for not fixing the economy. That was his job. He failed (too busy bombing weddings and funerals, and making individual decisions about who to assassinate.)