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After I put up my post comparing private-sector jobs under Obama and Bush, a number of people asked me whether I believe that presidents have a large effect on economic performance. My answer is no — but conservatives believe that they do, which is why this kind of comparison is useful.

To expand on my own views, in normal times the economy’s macroeconomic performance mainly depends on monetary policy, which isn’t under White House control. Now, we’ve been in a liquidity trap for the whole Obama administration so far, giving fiscal policy a much more central role — and the initial stimulus did help quite a lot. Since 2010, however, fiscal policy has been paralyzed by GOP obstruction, so we’re back to a situation where the WH has little influence.

The point, however, is that the right has insisted non-stop that Obama was doing terrible things to the economy — that health reform was a job-killer (one of the dozens of House votes repealing Obamacare was called the Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.) The tax hike on the top 1 percent in 2013 was also supposed to destroy the economy (much as the same people predicted disaster from the Clinton hike 20 years earlier.) Financial reform was similarly supposed to be hugely destructive. And there was constant invocation of the “Ma, he’s looking at me funny” doctrine — the claim that Obama, by not praising businessmen sufficiently, was scaring away the confidence fairy.

Given all that, the fact that the private sector has added more than twice as many jobs under that job-killing Obama as it did under pre-crisis Bush is important, not because Obama did it, but because it shows that there is no hint that the important things he did do had any negative effect at all, let alone the terrible effects right-wingers predicted. You can, it turns out, tax the rich, regulate the banks, and expand health insurance coverage without punishment by the invisible hand.