Terry Jeffrey keeps his personal grudge against President Obama going via his anti-Obama propaganda mill — masquerading as the “news” operation CNSNews.com — in full effect with a July 16 article attacking White House press secretary Jay Carney for saying that the stimulus bill “widely recognized to have broken the back of the recession.”
Note Jeffrey’s selective use of statistics to try to undermine Carney’s claim:
In January 2009, the month before Obama signed his stimulus, the national unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It has not dropped below 8 percent in any month since then. In February 2009, it hit 8.3 percent. In June 2012, it was 8.2 percent.
In January 2009, there were 12,049,000 unemployed people in the country, meaning there were that many people age 16 and older who wanted a job, had actively sought one in the previous four weeks, but had not been able to find one. In June 2012, there were 12,749,000 unemployed people—or 700,000 more than there were the month before Obama signed the stimulus.
The percentage of the American population actually holding jobs and the percentage of the population participating in the labor force (those either holding a job or actively looking for one) have both declined since January 2009. In that month, 60.6 percent of Americans 16 or older were working. In June 2012, 58.6 percent of Americans 16 or older were working. In January 2009, 65.7 percent of Americans 16 or older either held a job or were looking for one—and thus were participating in the labor force. By June 2012, that had dropped to 63.8 percent.In January 2009, 142,187,000 Americans had jobs. In June 2012, 142,415,000 Americans had jobs—an increase of just 228,000 in the number of employed Americans.
But January 2009 was not the bottom of the recession — October 2009 was. According to the same BLS statistics Jeffrey is using, the number of people who had jobs hit a low of 138,401,000 in October 2009. The number of unemployed peaked that same month with 15,421,000 without jobs, as did the unemployment rate, at 10.0 percent.
Jeffrey is making a dishonest comparison. Who’s surprised?