No, Mr. Obama, It Wasn’t a GOOD Jobs Report

Though we know one of the traditional roles of the President of the United States is Cheerleader in Chief, his recent optimistic trumpeting of the “good” December jobs report, which decreased from 9.8% to 9.4%, allegedly, made is shake our heads in wonder. While we’re not surprised a desperate administration resorts to fudging the counting technique ahead of an uncomfortably near run for a second term, there was enough hard data accompanying the report to let us see what’s really happening on the employment front around this formerly great nation of ours.

The number to pay attention to is that only 103,000 new non-farm jobs were created. With 125,000 additional workers entering the workforce every month, this isn’t even break even level. How Mr. Obama can claim job prospects are improving when it became harder for every person who is looking for work to find it, is beyond our capacity for reasoning. Not only does the December jobs report confirm the devastating effect the recession has had on the economy, the toll it has taken on the psyche of employed and unemployed workers alike shouldn’t be overlooked. The former worries if he’s going to have a job when he wakes up the morning, while the latter feels like he’s trying to scale a greased pole to ever find gainful employment at all.

In terms of unemployment rate, our current recession is the second worst since World War II (only the early ’80′s rate of 10.8% was worse). But the worst part is that the official jobs report only takes into account people still officially looking for work, and discards the ones who have given up, killed themselves, or joined the black market economy of drugs, prostitution, and murder for hire. Think that’s not happening? Think again. Desperate times force formerly law abiding citizens to take whatever measures necessary to put food on the table.

We already know that the official annual inflation number reported by the government is bogus, and has been for some time, ever since they removed the factors of food and energy from the equation, because certainly those are both optional consumer choices. Not counting the number of people who have stopped looking for work when releasing the jobs report makes about as much sense. It’s disingenuous at best and outright lying at worse.

The reality is that this was very, very far from being a good jobs report.

The Bonus Commissions Team

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