While President Obama appeared much less comatose in Tuesday night’s debate than he was during the first, he certainly played fast and loose with his facts. His constant claim that his administration has created in excess of five million private sector jobs since taking office has little to no supportive evidence.
If indeed there were five million private sector jobs created over the past four years, then why is the unemployment rate so much higher today than it was when he first took office?
The most recent jobs report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) showed the unemployment rate in the US dropping below 8% for the first time in 3 years. What the BLS failed to acknowledge was that this drop in the unemployment rate was a statistical aberration, in large part due to one state’s failure to make its unemployment statistics available. This is the final BLS report before Election Day and isn’t it convenient that this one state’s failure to provide unemployment data would make the unemployment rate appearing to be lower that it actually is? Expecting that the unemployment rate has dropped by .3% in an economy that’s at or below 1.3% GDP growth is in the same ballpark as believing that pigs can fly. For a real look at how Obama’s economic policies have worked, the graph released by the BLS is a visual telling of the President’s failures.
With regard to energy independence, Obama’s claim that there is more oil being produced in America today than ever before is gainsaid by the high cost of gas at the pumps. Understandably some of the increase is as a result of refinery capacity, but for the most part the high price of gasoline is a direct result of a deliberate curtailment of exploratory activity. In fact, Obama is on record saying he doesn’t really mind high gasoline prices because it will discourage use of the automobile among Americans.
Ditto for coal. Does no one remember Obama’s promise to put the coal industry out of business during the 2008 election campaign? But Tuesday night Obama had the temerity to say that he was a strong supporter of the coal industry and was responsible for the development of “clean” coal. Really? In 2008 he bragged about being totally opposed to any kind of coal, clean or otherwise, telling businesses they could build as many coal powered plants as they wished, but he guaranteed they would all go bankrupt due to his regulatory regime.
His obsession with renewable energy has resulted in the loss of tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs. Companies like Solyndra, LSP Energy, Bright Source and A 123 Solar are just a few of some 14 companies that have recently gone bust, sticking taxpayers with huge liabilities. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all in favor of renewable energy. But renewable energy schemes must be economically viable and not destroy jobs. Obama has spent the past four years attempting to fit square pegs into round holes and he’s now telling people these schemes have been wildly successful.
On the issue of General Motors Chrysler, Obama sneeringly accused Romney of wanting to take the automakers into bankruptcy, a fact that Romney didn’t dispute. What Romney pointed out and Obama has not acknowledged, is that by nationalizing GM and Chrysler, Obama did take them into bankruptcy. But it was a government-mandated bankruptcy and not a court supervised bankruptcy. Obama’s actions wound up hurting many investors who held GM and Chrysler stock, leaving them with worthless paper. Since when did the government get the power to seize a publicly held corporation, screw that corporation’s creditors and then give 50% of that corporation’s assets to friends of the administration, such as the United Auto Workers Union?
It’s naive to think that Tuesday night’s debate really changed the minds of any decided voters. But clearly the President is running on smoke and mirrors, telling voters that they should ignore their own and their neighbors’ experiences and instead buy into the fiction he’s attempting to pass off as reality. Are Americans really that stupid? Really?
Klaus Rohrich is senior columnist for Canada Free Press. Klaus also writes topical articles for numerous magazines. He has a regular column on RetirementHomes and is currently working on his first book dealing with the toxicity of liberalism. His work has been featured on the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, among others. He lives and works in a small town outside of Toronto.
