Rhetorical flights by Obama and Pelosi

 

“Well, I think what I would say is that we are nowhere near where we need to be, but keep in mind that when I took office, we had already lost 4 million jobs in the previous quarter and lost another 4 million in the three months when I first came into office.”

— President Obama, Nov. 1, 2011, in an interview with WTVT of Tampa Bay

“From a policy standpoint, I think it’s really important to know that President Obama was a job creator from day one. Now was the ditch that we were in so deep that when you’re talking to people and they still don’t have a job that that’s any consolation to them? No, but I’ll tell you this: If President Obama and the House congressional Democrats had not acted, we would be at 15 percent unemployment, again, no consolation to those without a job, but an important point to make.”

— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Nov. 3, 2011

 

On Thursday, House Minority Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that if the government had not spent nearly a trillion dollars in so-called stimulus money, the national unemployment rate would now be 15 percent.

“If President Obama and the House congressional Democrats had not acted, we would be at 15 percent unemployment,” she said.

In fact, the unemployment rate is over 16% and closer to 20%. Pelosi is making her claim based cooked numbers offered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If the BLS added “underutilized” workers to its stats, the unemployment rate would 16.2 percent. Underultilization and “marginally attached workers” are euphemisms for workers who want to work full-time but cannot find work.

Unemployment has not been this high or consistent since the last Great Depression. “With the economy in the throes of a catastrophic downturn, unemployment, no matter how it’s measured, will rise dramatically and impose yet more devastating costs on society and on those without a job or unable to find full-time work,” John Miller wrote in 2009 as the “downturn” (depression) began to deepen.

Even members of the private bankster cartel, the Federal Reserve, admit the numbers are much higher than Pelosi and the government admit.

“If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent,” said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart in August.

He also threw water on Pelosi’s assertion that spending around a trillion dollars in “stimulus” money helped the economy and created jobs. “My forecast for a slow recovery implies a protracted period of high unemployment,” he said, adding that it would be difficult to stimulate jobs through additional public spending. “Further fiscal stimulus has been mentioned, but the full effects of the first stimulus package are not yet clear, and the concern over adding to the federal deficit and the resulting national debt is warranted.”

Others put the number well above 16 percent. “The sad thing is unemployment is really probably at 21 percent if you go by the real numbers,” Donald Trump said in October.

“Unemployment is a major, major, major problem and governments don’t really create jobs entrepreneurs do,” said “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” author Robert Kiyosaki.

Even the Washington Post admits Pelosi grabbed her numbers out of thin air and her claim about Obama the job creator are at best facetious.

Following Pelosi’s theatrics, her spokesman Drew Hammill said she misspoke.

Politicians always “misspeak,” which is just a polite way to say they lie in order to get re-elected or mollify citizens who are increasingly outraged over a federal government out of control.

 

The Facts

President Obama’s numbers are easy to check. Let’s go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site and pull the data on monthly job loss or gains from the Current Employment Statistics survey.

The last quarter of 2008 shows a loss of 509,000 jobs in October, 802,000 in November and 619,000 in December. That adds up to 1.9 million — not 4 million.

And the first quarter of 2009 shows a loss of 802,000 jobs in January, 726,000 in February and 796,000 in March. That adds up to 2.3 million — not 4 million.

Now, maybe the numbers all blur after a while. When the president appeared on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 27, 2010, he was much more specific — and accurate.

 

“We lost 4 million jobs before I was sworn in; 750,000 the month I was sworn in; 600,000, the month after that; 600,000 the month after that. So most of the jobs that we lost were lost before the economic policies we put in place had any effect.”

 

Indeed, about 4 million jobs were lost in the period between the start of the recession in December 2007 and Obama’s inauguration. Then, from February to July, another 3.4 million jobs were lost. (One can quibble about when the policies began to have an effect.) With a longer time horizon, Obama’s statement would have been much closer to being accurate.

“The economy had lost about 8 million jobs before the President’s policies had a chance to take effect,” said White House spokesman Matt Lehrich. “While much work remains, those policies have stabilized the economy and put us on a path to recovery.”

Meanwhile, Pelosi on Thursday appeared to be making a more partisan point — that it was Obama and the congressional Democrats who saved the country from the possibility of 15 percent unemployment.

Asked about that specific figure, her staff directed us to a report issued last year, by Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi, that was titled, “How the Great Recession Was Brought to an End.” A spokesman pointed out a table on page 6, which showed unemployment would have been above 15 percent in 2010 — actually 16.3 percent — “with no policy response.”

But, wait, “no policy response” means absolutely nothing was done — including no Federal Reserve action and no Troubled Asset Relief Program started under President George W. Bush. If just the fiscal policies are considered, such as the stimulus bill, cash for clunkers and other bills passed by Obama and Congress, what would have happened? A chart on page 9 shows that while the impact still was important, the unemployment rate now would have been 11.4 percent.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said she misspoke. “She meant federal role, including TARP and Fed,” he said. He added that passage of TARP under Bush would not have happened without the support of congressional Democrats.

It is important to note that this is just one of at least nine studies about the impact of government actions taken at the start of the Obama administration, some of which were much less generous in assessing its impact.