Important graphs for understanding our unemployment

Why hasn't our unemployment rate improved? You hear different answers to that question, but here's the number of jobs over Obama's presidency in the private and public sectors:





The private sector bottomed out almost 2 years ago and has been steadily recovering. Government jobs have been steadily declining (minus the spike for the census).

Republicans always explain that unemployment is high because Obama has led an unprecedented expansion of "big government" that is preventing businesses from creating jobs, and what we need is "smaller government". But if that were true, the graphs above should be reversed. Businesses are creating jobs, but those are being offset by lost government jobs due to... smaller government.

Many people assume that all disagreements between Democrats and Republicans just boil down to opinions that can't be proven one way or the other. But sometimes you can be just plain wrong.