This claim by Mitt Romney on Wednesday in Colorado is 100 percent false:



They haven't been able to create jobs. In fact, all of the decline in the rate of unemployment from 10 percent at its peak to 8.1 percent now is due not to job creation. It's been due to people falling out of the workforce, dropping out of the workforce.

Here are the facts: Between October 2009 and the present, the unemployment rate has fallen from 10 percent to 8.1 percent. In October 2009, there were 129.5 million Americans with full-time jobs. Today, there are 133 million Americans with full-time jobs. That's a growth of. Don't believe me? The numbers are here

So yes, Mitt, they have been able to create jobs. And the workforce didn't decline during that period of time, either: It grew by 544,000.

And let's not forget the number one reason why job growth hasn't been stronger: layoffs in the public sector. In the private sector alone, more than 4 million jobs have been created since October 2009. But during the same period of time, a half-million public sector jobs were lost, and the reason why those jobs were lost is that too many concessions were made to Republicans in the stimulus and because Republicans used the filibuster and their recapture of the House to block the sorts of jobs bills that would have prevented those job losses.

But the bottom-line is that despite Mitt Romney's brazen dishonesty, job creation has driven the unemployment rate's decline over the last couple of years. You can cherry-pick particular months where that's not the case, but overall, since October 2009, the economy has grown and so have jobs along with it. And the biggest reason things haven't been stronger is that Mitt Romney's austerian ideas have had too much impact on our fiscal policy—not too little.