Playing Games With Employment Numbers and Recession TRUTHS

The Obama administration made much of the latest jobs numbers but it's another example how one can play games with statistics.

431,000 non-farm jobs were added in May. Sounds like a signal that the economy is picking up, eh? Not so fast though! 412,000(!) are temporary(!) government(!) jobs for the 2010 census whose layoff in the fall will send unemployment rates back up.

The administration also bragged about the unemployment rate dropping from 9.9% to 9.7%. Sounds good too. Until you know that 322,000 Americans dropped completely out of the job market which means they're no longer counted as unemployed. They gave up looking for work because there are no jobs available.

The president's quote about the numbers: "The economy's getting stronger by the day ... an indication that our policies are working". HUH? Either he really knows what the numbers mean and is consciously being dishonest or he refuses to recognize the reality of a stagnant economy. At some point he's going to have to face the reality that most of us understand ... adding scads and scads of government jobs doesn't fix a broken economy. In fact, in the absence of help for small businesses, it'll make things worse.

To put the jobs numbers in perspective, consider this. it'll take approximately 292,000 new jobs every month until 2015(!) just to get back to 5% employment that we had before the recession. 125,000 new jobs per month is needed just to keep it at its current stagnant level and keep it from getting worse.

Remember what got us here. It was not Bush policies that caused the recession although his policies made it tougher to recover because of the debt he created. The cause was unequivocally the sub-prime mortgage mess and that was the doing of Democratic meddling in the mortgage business going back to the Clinton years when he, by executive order, forced Fannie and Freddie to make HALF(!) of their mortgages be the toxic(!) sub-prime type. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd. both leading democrats, made it worse by pushing sub-prime mortgages even more and denying that they were causing a problem when it was clear to everyone with half a brain (even Bush!) that they were trouble with a capital T. Bush tried to stop sub-prime mortgages but democrats shut his proposals down.

It's at the same time funny and sad that democrats have continuously gotten away with claiming the recession is Bush's and Republican's fault. Never mind that everyone agrees it was the Democrats' own sub-prime mortgage ideas and policies that caused it. Never mind that democrats were in power in Congress (the body responsible for fixing such messes, not the president!) for two years(!) before the recession started. They had two years to fix it and could have if they had wanted to. How they can get away with calling it Bush's fault just amazes me!

Now that the recession is worse than Obama expected and lasting longer than he expected he's still blaming Bush even though democrats were not only responsible for most of it but had two years to do something to fix it before it happened. Politics is interesting, eh? That so many Americans still swallow that nonsense is nothing short of astounding!

So, I think it's time once again to ask President Obama, so how is that government bailout thing working out for you ... and for us? You know, that bailout we agreed to that was supposed to keep unemployment below 8%. His lame excuse of "it's Bush's fault" is wearing a bit thin, is it not?

Pardon me, but I've got to say, I told you so my friends.