11/10/2009

New Fox News piece: Blame Obama for High Unemployment

My new piece starts off this way:

This wasn't supposed to happen. At the end of February, after the $787 billion stimulus was approved, the Obama administration predicted that unemployment would average only 8.1 percent this year. Indeed, in February the unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent. Yet, in November unemployment now stands at 10.2 percent and keeps rising.

There is also another, wider unemployment measure seldom mentioned. When you count the unemployed who have become so discouraged that they have given up looking for work or have only accepted a part-time job, our country now has an unemployment rate that stands at a staggering 17.5 percent. Confirming these other numbers, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Household Survey finds that 3.5 million jobs have been lost since February. And it is also worth noting that the nation's unemployment rate has also been rising much faster than in other countries.

On October 30, President Obama claimed that massive government spending programs had already created or saved 640,239 jobs. The spin the administration is putting on this is that the 3.5 million jobs lost would have been 4.1 million without any government intervention.

Not too surprisingly, Democrats have already started calling for another round of government spending to reduce unemployment. While the media has questioned how many jobs were actually created by the government spending, it has unquestioningly accepted the notion that government spending creates jobs in the first place. Take some of the discussions witnessed in the electronic media over the last week: . . .

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