Monday, September 10, 2012

US Unemployment by the numbers

Main stream media headlines are trumpeting that unemployment in the US has gone down to 8.1% and the administration is trumpeting this as proof that there policies are working (aka *vote for us*.)

From one of their most recent "Look how far we've come, as President Obama has kept his promises" emails, comes this:

In the past four years, Americans have worked together to climb back from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Before President Obama took office in 2009, the economy was losing nearly 800,000 jobs a month. Now, under the President’s leadership, the economy has added 4.5 million private sector jobs over the last 29 months.

There is much more work to do to build a stronger, globally competitive economy from the middle class out. But here’s a look back at what we’ve accomplished together with the President at the helm:

· Creating and saving American jobs: The month President Obama took office, we lost 839,000 private sector jobs. Now, we’ve experienced 29 straight months of private sector job growth, with businesses creating over 4.5 million jobs during that time. After 13 straight years of losing manufacturing jobs, we are now seeing the strongest 30-month period of manufacturing job growth since June 1989. Thanks to the President’s decision to rescue the American auto industry, we not only saved more than a million jobs up and down the supply chain, but American auto companies have repaid their outstanding loans, are now making record profits, and are leading an auto industry that has added about 250,000 jobs since the end of the recession. Knowing that small businesses are the engines of job growth, President Obama has cut taxes for small businesses 18 times and supported more than 150,000 loans to small businesses so they can expand and hire more workers.

More to do: Despite Republican obstruction in Congress, the President continues to push his plan to create jobs now by keeping teachers and first responders on the job, putting construction workers back to work, and giving tax cuts to small businesses that invest and hire. ...


As anybody who has studied or worked with statistics knows, (and I have) numbers can be manipulated, interpreted to push whatever 'story' line wanted. As anyone who has paid even the slightest attention over the last four years knows, just about every sentence in the above self-congratulatory twaddle is - at the least - a misrepresentation of reality. How's that for unboased, objective 'reporting'???! What's good for the goose etc etc...

War on Terror News has this:

Saturday, September 08, 2012

No comments: