There has been much complaint about the Obama job recovery and many think we should trust our economy to Governor Romney because President Obama is doing such a bad job. His stimulus failed they say.

In my view President Obama is doing a good job considering where we came from 4 years ago and the lack of cooperation from Republicans in Congress who have blocked many of his attempts in the past 2 years to fix the jobs situation.

There is absolutely no credible evidence that Republican ideas would help the job market. Well, there are theories and “Atlas Shrugged” but no real evidence. After all, Republican ideas were put into effect in the years before the economic melt-down and we saw the result. Why are these ideas and this party going to fix things now?

So I thought it would be a good idea to revisit an old post from over a year ago and update it with new job figures.

The graph below shows the month to month change in private employment during the months from January 2008 to October 2012. The numbers on the right indicate thousands of jobs gained or lost each month. All numbers and the graph are from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor.

The graph clearly shows accelerating job loss in 2008 hitting over 800,0000 jobs lost in January 2009, staying in that area for several months, followed by a decreasing job loss, and emerging into positive job growth in early 2010. The job growth is too small bring down our stubbornly high unemployment rate but it is moving in the right direction. We need to create more jobs to keep up with the constantly growing labor force. Total job figures are a bit lower as we have the number of jobs in the public sector decreasing in many months.

There are quite a few things that could influence the economy in this time. The slow-down in job decline in early 2009 seems to suggest that stimulus plan seems to have worked but is now slowing down. The TARP program passed in late 2008 may have helped this recovery. And one could argue that things would be better or worse if we had followed a different plan.

So President Obama seems to be doing as well as could be expected and it seems the most sensible course would be to re-elect him and re-elect fewer Republicans to Congress.