America is better off when President Obama is out on the stump bloviating and boasting rather than in Washington actively doing harm. But the whoppers he just told the students at the University of Wisconsin are beyond the pale. Said our spinmeister-in-chief:

 And the unemployment rate is now down to 5.3 percent. (Applause.) Keep in mind, when I came into office it was hovering around 10 percent. All told, we've now seen 64 straight months of private sector job growth, which is a new record — (applause) — new record — 12.8 million new jobs all told.

That's a pack of context-free factoids. There is still such a thing as the business cycle, and only economically illiterate hacks—-like those who work on the White House speech writing staff—-would measure anything from the deep V-shaped but momentary bottom that happened to occur during Obama's second year in office. What counts is not that we've had a bounce after a terrible bust, but where we are now on a trend basis.

The answer is absolutely nowhere!

We are now 29 quarters from the pre-crisis peak and total non-farm labor hours utilized by the US economy are no higher than they were in Q4 2007. In other words, if you use a common unit of measure—–labor hours rather than job slots which treat coal-miners and part-time pizza delivery boys alike—–there have been no new units of employment at all. Our teleprompter reading President is actually tooting his own horn about recycled hours and "born again"  jobs and doesn't even know it.

And, no, he can't take credit for digging us out of the hole created by the Great Recession, either. The long, slow climb back to square one shown in the chart above was due to the natural resilience of our capitalist economy—notwithstanding the tax, regulatory and massive debt hurdles that Washington policies have thrown at it.

The truth of the matter is that America's employment machine has been failing for this entire century. As shown below, the number of non-farm labor hours utilized during the most recent quarter was only 1% higher than in the spring of 2000—-way back when Bill Clinton still had his hands on things in the Oval Office.

In short, we have gone through two business cycles and have essentially added zero new employment inputs to the US economy.  And that marks a sharp and devastating reversal of previous trends. In fact, the BLS' own data convey an out-and-out crisis that the President should have been lamenting, not a cherry-picked simulacrum of growth based on born-again, apples-and-oranges jobs slots.