Today’s unemployment report resembled Obama’s debate performance: poor and misleading. Wednesday, the President tried to convince the American people that they are better off than they were 4 years ago, but Americans are not buying it. When the numbers are all against you, it is hard to disguise failure.

Today’s job report reflects that failure. The report showed the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent, with the economy adding only 114,000 more jobs in the month of September. This is being hailed as good news by the President and the media. It speaks to how bad the economy is if this jobs report is praised as good news.

Take a look:

One of the reasons the employment number continues to drop is because people are leaving the workforce. If we were to calculate the unemployment rate with the same labor force participation we had in 2009, the real unemployment rate would be 10.75 percent; not a pretty picture at all. It is even worse when you consider that Obama promised that the unemployment rate would be less than 6 percent by today with his failed stimulus.

This supposed “good” news for Obama is being celebrated on the backs of the 8.7 million people who are not only unemployed, but have given up looking for jobs since Obama took office in January 2009.

For a reminder of what a real recovery looks like, one should consider how Reagan’s policies helped the economy.

At this point in the Reagan presidency the economy was constantly adding more than 120,000 jobs, totaling more than 9.8 million jobs since the end of the recession in the 80s. 

Obama has only been able to manage to add 2.9 million jobs since the beginning of the Obama presidency.

Even worse, since the beginning of Obama’s presidency, the economy has lost now a total of 965,000 jobs, while Reagan’s presidency oversaw an increase of 2.9 million at this point in his presidency.

These numbers cannot hide the failure of the President’s big government policies: America is much worse off today than it was when Obama took office. His policies have contributed to making this recession one of the longest and worst in American history.

In order for a true recovery, the government needs to pursue policies that will allow the economy to grow and prosper. Reagan’s economic policies of cutting taxes and reducing regulation helped a broken economy recover. We need more than just empty rhetoric; we need real policies that will help American families. The policies of Reagan are just those policies.