What Is Obama’s Actual Record On Creating Jobs?

The U.S. economy has been staggering for months and is still millions of jobs away [1] from recovering from the nearly 9 million jobs lost since the start of the recession. Indeed, the official unemployment rate has hovered around 9 percent or 10 percent [2] for more than two years.

President Obama has promised to focus on jobs, so we decided to look at his actual record: What exactly has the Obama administration done to create jobs so far? Here's a look at Obama's jobs initiatives, the hits, the misses, and the ones we're still waiting for an answer on.

Overall, job creation has been relatively meager during the Obama administration, particularly compared to the massive job losses brought on by the recession [1]. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, even if job creation were happening at pre-recession levels, it would take us 11 years to get back to an unemployment rate of 5 percent [3].

Keep in mind: There is no sure-fire way to count how many jobs a given program added to the economy. Some economists use economic models to gauge how the economy would have progressed in the absence of that program. Others look at raw data. As the Washington Post's WonkBook has detailed [4], there are drawbacks to both approaches. But they can still give you an overall picture.

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