Misleading Chart

I've seen this chart floating around on Facebook an awful lot lately and I'm baffled at how people are interpreting it.  I believe most people see this as a positive thing for the president, but I look at it and I'm just not that impressed...  Here's the chart:

It looks like things are going up, right?  At the first glance, it's pretty deceiving.  You might look at this and think, "Hell yes, things are better than they were during Bush!"  Before you start doing a victory dance look at the chart.  I mean really look at it.  Notice that the distance from the mid-point to the first marked line above it represents 150,000 jobs.  The same distance in the negative direction represents a loss of 250,000 jobs.  This is done intentionally to make a lesser gain look like it offsets a larger loss.  Also, in January 2009 when Obama took over, the bar should be equally divided, but it's not.  Bush's color is given a larger portion of the bar, visually giving him more of the losses.  It's also important to note that this graph begins in January 2008, which only represents 1/8th of President Bush's term.  Prior to this, the graph shows positive gains in jobs, larger than any gains experienced during Obama's rein in office... but they don't want to show that for obvious reasons.

Ignoring all of the visual trickery, lets just do some simple math here.

The number of jobs LOST during the Obama administration (counting half of the jobs from the bar when he took office) is 4,631,500.  The number of jobs gained during his administration is 4,544,000.  The NET LOSS is 87,500 jobs.  That's over 80,000 jobs that were here four years ago that aren't here today.  To me, that means we're still doing worse than we were four years ago.

In comparison, the number of jobs LOST during the Bush administration (counting half of the jobs from the bar representing when Obama took office) is 4,242,500.  That's less jobs than were lost during the Obama administration.  You heard it here first folks, less jobs were lost during the Bush administration than the Obama administration.

The country is not better off than it was four years ago.  I remember a certain someone saying that if he hadn't turning things around in three years, it would be a one-term endeavor.  Guess what, he didn't turn things around in three years.  He didn't even turn things around in nearly four years...