Romney's "Normal Recovery" Has Actually Never Ever Happened

I like Mitt Romney's peppiness about an economy that adds 500,000 jobs a month.  That would be terrific, especially coming off a huge recession where unemployment hit 10%.

"We should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month. This is way, way off from what should happen in a normal recovery."-- Mitt Romney on Fox News

Unfortunately, as many media outlets have pointed out, such a monthly jobs number has only happened 16 separate times in American history.  So to ground Romney's expectations into reality, a nice economic recovery that would offset the horrible recession should be adding about 250,000-300,000 jobs a month, consistently.  We obviously aren't doing that because in April we only added 115,000.

What's worse is that for almost a decade, during the first 7 years of Bush's two-terms, the economy added a meager 16,000 jobs a month.  That's not enough to keep up with the birth rate or the immigration rate.  So for 7 straight years we had extremely pathetic job creation, and then guess what?  The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression hit (yes while Bush was still in office) and job growth went from terrible to the worst job losses in 80 years.

It's not like we are dealing with a brief time span of job losses that can easily be fixed with a completely unheard of 500,000 jobs being added each month.  We're dealing with a solid decade of an unemployment slump.  One that went from anemic growth to total disaster.  Only recently, largely due to President Obama's policies, have we seen 26 straight months of job growth.  We all admit we want more job growth.  You won't find anyone who says it's acceptable.  And that's where the two sides really differ.  Where were these economic geniuses when jobs were being shredded and/or growing much weaker than they are today? Oh yeah, that's when they were in charge and speaking ill of America then was not allowed.