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Fibbing With GM Job Creation Statistics, Bill Clinton Edition

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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 by 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.

Taking this further, there are approximate statistics for the number of jobs lost in the closing of GM dealerships. Between June 2009 and the present, about 1,500 GM dealerships closed. The job loss due to those closings was around 63,000 – about the same as the number of GM manufacturing workers in the U.S.

Clinton claims the 250,000 new auto-industry job gains are miraculously the result of the 4,500 new jobs in GM, and the loss of  63,000 jobs in GM dealerships. Well, maybe with Democratic arithmetic it works out. After all, the 4,500 job manufacturing gains were of UAW workers and the 63,000 job losses were of non-union yokels, preying on old ladies in car lots across flyover America.

But perhaps Clinton is correct in a perverse way. The GM bankruptcy signals to foreign manufacturers that the U.S. market is wide open. America’s dominant manufacturer is tied down by UAW wages and work rules, by CAFÉ standards that it cannot meet, and required to produce green cars that its technology cannot support. The U.S. is open for business Toyota, Volkswagen and the rest. Come on in.

According to these numbers, Clinton should have said: Obama minus 58,500 jobs, Romney zero. For those who do not like math, zero is a higher number than minus 58,500.

Paul Gregory’s new book “Women of the Gulag” will be published shortly by Hoover Press. Please visit here for a preview and information about the companion “Women of the Gulag” documentary.