It's a figure that was touted a lot during the Democratic National Convention, but have 4.5 million new jobs really been created under this administration? Lachlan Markay, an investigative reporter for The Heritage Foundation, says it all depends on when you start counting.
"[That's the number] only if you measure it from early 2010," Markay explains. "If you take it from the beginning of the Obama administration, we're looking at about a net 300,000 private sector jobs -- obviously far fewer than we'd need to see any sort of meaningful recovery."
But even if one accepts that time frame, Markay says it has to be compared to similar cases historically. "If you look at the recession of the early 1980s, we saw about three times the number of jobs created since the end of the actual recession under President [Ronald] Reagan," he says.
The Heritage spokesman says he believes the Obama administration includes temporary census jobs. "It's sort of a wash," he says, "because if you look at the employment chart including the census jobs, you see a big spike right when there was a lot of [census] activity -- but then it goes right back down once most of those jobs were taken off the books."
Markay adds that even with the slight decline in public sector jobs over the past few years, the unemployment rate for government workers is still well below what it is for private sector workers.