A picture is worth a thousand words; or Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

There’s a graphic that has been distributed by Obama’s machine that purports to illustrate the “success” of the stimulus and other Democrat policies in handling unemployment and the economy. You may have seen it:

This graph illustrates a decline in job losses that roughly corresponds to the beginning of the Obama administration. By selecting this particular metric, they are managing to portray an image of decisive change for the good under the Democrats.
The Heritage Foundation has posted a graph on its website, which, instead of job losses, focuses on the actual number of jobs in the American economy. This is a better measure of how many jobs are available to the unemployed, and therefore a more accurate portrayal of the state of unemployment in the country. Here is their graph:

As you can see, the number of actual jobs in the economy was steadily rising until the Democrats took charge of Congress in 2007, and thereafter remained fairly stable until the third quarter of 2008. With Obama’s inauguration in the first quarter of 2009, there is a massive drop of over 2 million jobs, and the job market continues to shrink from there. The most recent report has the US job market at under 130 million jobs.