One claim Republicans make to support their proposition that the country’s worse off than it was “four years ago” is that there are fewer jobs in America today than there were when President Obama took office.

“[H]e hasn’t created one single net new job since he’s been president,” Mitt Romney’s spokeswoman Andrea Saul said on MSNBC Tuesday afternoon.

The keys here are the words “net” and “since he’s been president.” And by that extremely narrow and literal reading, the claim is true — there are fewer net jobs in the country today than there were on the day Obama took office. But the claim invites us to look at the numbers more closely and from different angles.

No matter which figures you use, or how you interpret them, they can’t obscure the fact that the economy’s still weak, and has rebounded from the great recession slowly. But they also show that — under Obama’s watch, and despite GOP bromides about growing government — the economy has hemorrhaged public sector jobs. Indeed, the GOP’s argument falls apart when you look at private sector jobs alone. And it’s likely that before the election in November, it will fall apart altogether.

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