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| By Jesse Merkel |
On Friday the most recent American jobless numbers hit the wires. The unemployment rate had fallen to 8.2%. While this normally would be perceived as amazing news, people need to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. The experts were all expecting that close to 203,000 new jobs would be added in March. Instead, 120,000 jobs were added.
Of course every new job is a bit of desperately needed good news. However, the Obama administration is painting this drip to 8.2% like it is a major achievement. It’s not. They’re being extremely disingenuous about the current state of the economy, failing to tell the American people that the reason the rate has dropped is because there are close to 2 million fewer jobs available in the country now than when President Obama took office.
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| President Barack Obama (Picture by Lawrence Jackson) |
The recession has wiped out millions of jobs. They left the economy during the big crash and massive drop off in 2009, and they have not come back. With a smaller number of overall jobs to draw from, the number of unemployed people naturally shrinks. The official Labor Department numbers also do not count the vase number of people who have given up looking for work entirely. With all of this taken into account, the real unemployment rate is actually estimated at astaggering 14.5%.
That’s close to double what the administration and the Labor Department are reporting. Millions of men and women have been out of work so long that they have simply given up. They’re no longer looking, so they are no longer counted as unemployed. And the numbers only continue to get worse the more someone digs. The number of people who are currently not in the labor force has soared to nearly 88 million.
March also marked the 40th straight deficit month. This pattern of spending began heavily during the initial stages of the collapse and picked up steam after Obama took the reins in 2009. Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney pounced on the news immediately, blaming the president's reckless spending and anti-business policies for an economy that by all accounts appears to be stagnating.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently warned that the economy is not growing at a strong enough rate to sustain strong growth in terms of jobs. It could also stall the falling unemployment rate, even though the numbers are artificially lowered.
The president may not have caused the economic crisis, but he sure isn’t helping much. Obama was forced to admit that many of the "shovel ready" jobs in his bloated stimulus bill were not as shovel ready as they had thought, which brings up serious questions as to just how much of a handle the president and his staff have on economics.
The Obama administration has poured hundreds and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into green energy companies like Solyndra. This magical wave of green energy was supposed to be but the crest on an emerging industry that would be responsible for millions of new jobs. Each of these companies has now gone bankrupt, while other projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline are put on hold or slowed to a snail's pace.
The administration can cheer 8.2% and blame previous presidents all they want, but they cannot change basic math. Eighty-eight million people who are eligible to work are not working. Millions are actively looking and cannot find a job, while others still have to settle for part-time employment. Debt and deficits are backbreaking, and it’s only going to get worse. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala) recently finished going through every page of Obamacare, calculated that it will end up creating nearly $17 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
It’s good that 120,000 people found work last month, but it does not change the fact that the tools used to measure the recovery do not reflect reality. No amount of media salivating over these numbers will change the fact that millions of people cannot find work, and millions more have simply given up.
In 2006, when the Democrats and the liberal media were frantically trying to say Bush had already driven the country into a massive recession, the Dow Jones was approaching 14,000 points and unemployment averaged 4.6%. The administration could be playing the expectations game. Claim that a number that used to be appalling is now a blessing and hope people come to accept it.
President Obama’s Keynesian style economic policies have not led to some miraculous recovery, although he’s no doubt hoping that there are enough people out there unaware of the facts to boost him through the election. The manner in which the administration puts out information is an insult to the American peoples, intelligence. Yes, other administrations have played this game before, but wasn’t this supposed to be the most transparent administration of all time?
There may be no hope unless we wind up with a change come November.
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