An Ideologue's Reality

Flopping Aces ^ | February 10, 2011 | Dan Scott

[dscott8186]

Over the past year President Obama and liberal Democrats in general have been taking a pounding on the issue of unemployment and their prescription to solve this problem via Keynesian pump priming. They went so far as to issue the now infamous graphic showing their projection of what would happen if they didn’t do anything versus spending money we didn’t have via Stimulus Spending. In two years time, the hype about creating or saving three million jobs has pretty much been dropped by the Obama Administration. Having VP Joe Biden continually and somewhat comically demonstrate the lack of credibility of such a measureless assertion created more cynicism among the voters than confidence. The elections of November 2010 put an end to this silly meritless assertion since the voters seeing 9+% unemployment demonstrated they weren’t buying what was being foisted.

The wild annual trillion dollar deficit spending by a prolificate Congress with little to show for it frightened the voters enough that change was deemed necessary. Now that Barack Obama is looking to get re-elected in 2012, it seems the metrics need to be changed in his favor. Perversely, part of this change was the faulty definition of unemployment. By the definition a person is only considered unemployed if their period of joblessness is less than a year. To be fair, this definition was in place long before Obama became president. Under normal recessions this definition never truly impacted the math determining the unemployment rate. However, this is no normal recession and it is not unusual for a person to be unemployed for greater than a year in high unemployment areas, which brings us to some needed context.

[dscott8186]

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