Trivia question: Which 21st century U.S. president nearly choked the life out of the private sector?

Fun fact: On average, more private sector jobs have been created each month under Obama than in eight full years of Bush.
' @jedlewison via Twitter for Mac You probably already know that George W. Bush had a net negative private sector jobs creation record, losing 646,000 jobs.

And you also probably know President Obama has a net positive private sector jobs creation record, with private sector payrolls up by 55,000.

And you might even know that because of a quirk on the way jobs are reported, roughly a quarter-million jobs that were lost between Jan. 12 and Jan. 21 are generally said to have occurred during the Obama administration, not the Bush one'even though they didn't. Because of that, the real numbers are probably more like 900,000 private sector jobs lost during the Bush presidency and 300,000 jobs created so far under Obama.

But even those numbers don't tell the whole story because when President Obama took office, the economy was in collapse'and over the past 27 months, the private sector has gained 4.3 million jobs. That's not perfect, but it's a lot better than things were under Bush, and it's a lot better than things are now in the public sector'and that's the point President Obama was making on Friday.

No matter how you slice it, however, Obama's private sector jobs record is much better than Bush's. There's simply no question about it'and it really shouldn't be a tough trivia question.

But here's a question that is hard to answer: Given Bush's abysmal economic record, why is Mitt Romney proposing to double down on Bush's economic policies?

(Note: The data source for the numbers cited in this post is the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Raw data here.)