Fact-Check: Yes, the Obama-Clinton Recovery is the Slowest, Since…

During Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Indiana Governor Mike Pence said: “We’re in the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression.”

Fact check: MOSTLY TRUE.

Pence is right, according to a report from the Heartland Institute, a conservative policy organization. 

His claim might, however, understate the role of the Second World War, which jump-started the economy — not through spending, but by relaxing many of the restrictions that had slowed recovery from the Great Depression.

So others say it is simply the slowest since World War II, or 1949. Regardless, it has been slow.

Kaine’s numbers, by contrast, fell short. He claimed that the Obama administration had created 15 million jobs — a claim that only works if you ignore the first year of Obama’s presidency, when unemployment continued to rise. Kaine overstated the number of jobs created by some 5 million.

None other than the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, disputed the Clinton campaign’s “15 million jobs” talking point: “Clinton frequently indicates that she’s talking about the entire Obama administration. She uses phrases such ‘than when they took office’ or ‘in the last 7 1/2 years.’ But that’s 5 million jobs too many.”

And that’s without looking at the decline in household wealth, the rise in the number of Americans who have dropped out of the labor force, and the staggering national debt that produced virtually nothing, jobs-wise, for $10 trillion in deficit spending.