By Rick Manning
What happens when the Obama Administration goes into full spin cycle? You get Newsweek cover articles that proclaim “America is Back”. As much as I wish this was true, it just doesn’t jibe with economic reality.
Just yesterday, the weekly unemployment claims report climbed for the second week in a row by 24,000 to a seasonally adjusted 484,000 claims. This is the highest level since late February, hardly a sign of economic recovery for those Americans who are looking for work.
The monthly jobless numbers are also at the second highest sustained levels since World War II. Ironically, some Obama spinners are proclaiming the March employment numbers as “strong”. While temporary hiring for the U.S. Census helped to boost the total positive job number to 162,000, the actual unemployment rate went from 9.687 percent to 9.749 percent – an increase.
More troubling still is the fact that more than half million jobs continue to be lost during the nine months of recovery. That’s right, 543,000 jobs have been lost since the Obama recovery started.
That’s hope and change for you.
As for the spinmeisters, in 2006, when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid were convincing America to give them control of Congress, Gallup reported that only 44 percent of Americans believed that the economy was excellent or good, while 55 percent of Americans rated it fair to poor.
Yet, in spite of Democratic political messaging that screamed that President Bush had the worst job creation record since the Hoover Administration, the unemployment rate in January 2007, when Pelosi and Reid took power, stood at 4.6 percent with a total of 7 million people unemployed. Today, in this “job-loss recovery,” the unemployment rate is 9.7 percent with 15 million unemployed.
Ironically, when the Democratic Policy Committee released an updated fact sheet in 2007 titled, “Middle-Class Life Under Bush: Less Affordable and Less Secure” they got one thing right when they stated, “A growing economy should be good news for those seeking jobs.”
Nine months into the Obama recovery, after wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a fraudulent “stimulus” package, the economy is half million jobs weaker than before the start of the so-called recovery.
That’s a half million more Americans who struggle to pay the mortgage. That’s half million more Americans who are scrambling to make payments. That’s half million more Americans who suffer the depressing knowledge that they are not paying their own way.
If this is Obama’s idea of a recovery, then I’d hate to see his idea of a depression.
Rick Manning is the Director of Communications for Americans for Limited Government and the former Public Affairs Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Labor.
