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Anonymous
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Summary
For more than a year, we’ve been pointing out on a regular basis how President Obama, his allies and his critics all misuse or even fabricate statistics to give voters a skewed picture of reality. This time we’ll just offer the accurate numbers.
Here — in a graphic suitable for framing, embossing, emailing to friends or posting on social media — is an accurate statistical picture of key changes that occurred since Obama took office in January 2009. The indicators are all derived from the most authoritative and up-to-date sources available.
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We’ve included the good, the bad and the indifferent — a booming stock market, a plunge in “real” (inflation-adjusted) household incomes, and a jobless rate that is exactly where it was when Obama took office. The U.S. dependence on foreign oil is down, but gasoline prices are up (though not quite as high as their high point under President Bush).
Opinions will differ on how much credit or blame a president deserves for things that happen during his time in office. And not everything can be reduced to a single number. Obama took office as the jobless rate was shooting up, for example. It peaked at 10 percent, and has drifted down since then. All of the 4 million jobs lost during his first 13 months in office have now been regained, plus about 300,000 more (counting the routine annual adjustment the Bureau of Labor Statistics has announced on a preliminary basis).
And some of the numbers here don’t reflect very recent changes. Income and poverty figures are for 2011, for example, and there’s reason to believe those are improving in 2012.
The stories behind each of these quick summary figures, plus hyperlinks to the official sources, are contained in the Analysis section.
http://factcheck.org/2012/10/obamas-numbers/