Not an Obama defender by any means, but surely you know that the President does very little to influence an economic recovery. (Think back to 2002, you were likely to be stating this as fact as the Bush recovery was lagging.)
yeah yeah yeah
I hear this every time the jobless rate rises or falls. Bull.
The guy in the White House sets the tone, and I don't care which party he is affiliated with, or what color he is. He may not create jobs himself, but he influences those that do. By the economic policies he enacts, he has a direct effect on what business decide to do in the realm of hiring, increasing production, expanding markets -- or not.
The worst part of the statistics, and the one you didn't address, is the loss of over 300,000 people from the job market. It isn't that they've truly stopped looking, it is that the government doesn't count them because their benefits ran out. How they can determine from Washington that a guy in South Dakota "isn't looking" simply because his extended benefits ran out in a miserable, apathetic economy is beyond me. Must be mind readers in DoL, I guess. How else do they determine someone quits printing out his resumes and making phone calls just because the feds stop sending him a check? More likely, he stopped doing that
while he was getting a check!
The economy added 440,000 jobs that past two months and right wing talking heads said that was a fluke.
It wasn't a fluke, it was cooking the books on the part of the Labor Dept. They wanted consumers to go into the holidays confident and ready to spend. Didn't work. The reality is, those 440,000 jobs were not created in two months, they were created since August, and were "saved up" by Labor statisticians to use in November and December to try to make things look better than they are. If you want proof, look at what adding those numbers back into August, September and October reporting would do. Spread them out evenly, and it shows an economy in malaise, barely growing, not improving, which is, like it or not, reality.
There is a recovery happening. It's the slowest, most protracted one in history.
The slowest, most protracted recovery in history is not, then, in the historical sense, a recovery at all. It is stagnation. More professionally speaking, it is called "economic immobilization." It is a prolonged period of slow economic growth traditionally measured in terms of the GDP growth, usually accompanied by high unemployment, a description for which this unemployment rate qualifies, given "full employment" is traditionally that rate which is under five percent, a figure that represents normal economic activity in the job market. Growth less than 2-3% per year is a sign of stagnation. We haven't had consistent growth of of more than 3% since the Great Pretender took office. He's a socialist. He isn't going to influence the economy to grow. He
wants it to stagnate so he can institute socialist policies in "defense of the dollar," and in "defense of the middle class," which he is actually out to destroy.
