Running out of topics to brag about and ways to spin them just before the mid-term elections, President Obama is up to his usual community organizer tactics. This time, telling us that his economy is better now than when he took office. Maybe in his own mind, but nowhere else.
The record national debt aside, President Obama ignores the trillions of dollars in government spending and conflates that with economic growth. Government spending is not the U.S. economy. It’s government spending. The U.S. economy is private sector business transactions.
Reality is the economy is not healthy. In fact, the economy is at half-mast. How could that be when the Dept. of Labor reports a decrease in unemployment to 5.9%, you ask? It is because the Dept. of Labor did not count 698,000 unemployed Americans as being unemployed. And for as much as President Obama cares, they may as well be dead. He can’t run on killing 698,000 Americans. He can run on an unemployment rate of 5.9%.
Taking into account those 698,000 Americans and all the millions of other Americans that the Dept. of Labor stopped counting, the real unemployment rate (knows as the U-6) is exactly double what the administration is touting as their great success, 11.8%. And long term unemployment comprises one-third of all those unemployed. Try running and campaigning on that Mr. President.
Today, the U.S. Dept. of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released their weekly jobs data. They report that 248,000 jobs were created in the month of September. Disconnected from that number is the number of new jobless claims from the DOL which were 287,000 for the week ending September 27. According to the Dept. of Labor, the seasonally adjusted 4-week moving average ending September 27 was 294,750. That amounts to 1,179,000 jobs lost in the 4-weeks ending Sept. 27. Here’s a picture of Obama’s economic success. 248,000 jobs created (most of them a second job), and 1.18 million jobs lost. For those educated in a government school, or the hopelessly devoted Obama acolyte, that’s a net job loss of 931,000 jobs.
So NO, the economy is not doing well. Armed with the truth, watch how the president will tell you with a straight face how well it (he) is doing.
