Obama Writing Off 15 Million Unemployed Americans. They Don't Matter. Not Even Counted Anymore
By Eron Thomas:
The howling and feigned outrage on the left regarding the 47 % comment made by Romney in a private fund raising event in Florida is almost comical. Does anyone out there realize that the Obama administration has for four years been routinely disenfranchising millions of unemployed Americans with the way they have been calculating and reporting the number of under and unemployed Americans? The newspapers and the television networks are complicit in their absolute silence.
A simple search of the internet https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USAWFPNA will show that over the last 5 observations there are about 240 million working age Americans in the US. This means that for every 1% of unemployment 2.4 million Americans are not working. The administration does not count under or unemployed people who have exhausted the benefits: who are under employed, or who have just given up looking for work. So for all intent and purposes these people don’t exist. They are not important enough to the Obama Administration to even be counted anymore. You might wondering, “Why would they do that? What do they have to gain? This kind of calculation artificially lowers the unemployment numbers.
The currently reported number is 7.8%. Most in the media know this number is false, but for the purposes of this discussion let’s use that number. With 240 million working age adults in the US, this number translates to approximately 18.72 million not working. This is a terrible number mind you but the reality is much worse. If we use the actual number of 14% for the unemployment number 33.6 million Americans are unemployed, under employed, or have just given up looking for work all together. This means that 14.88 million Americans have just been written off by the Obama administration. Think about that for a minute: these folks matter so little to Obama that his administration doesn’t even count them anymore.
It is one thing for a guy (Romney) to make an indelicate remark in a private fundraiser. It was a poorly worded remark for which he apologized. In the not too distant past I remember another presidential candidate who waxed eloquently about mid-westerns clinging to god and guns with antipathy for others. In my mind these are simple mistakes that anyone could make and I gave both of them a pass on their remarks.
It is quite another for the Obama administration to purposely and systematically disenfranchise unemployed Americans by creating an unemployment reporting policy to just zero people out: these kinds of unemployment reporting policies are deceptive and fundamentally wrong. The reality here is that almost 15 million Americans are struggling to take care of their families and Obama has written them off. They don’t even count anymore, and all for his political GAIN. I wonder if anyone other than me can see the irony of the 47% comment now. Romney’s was a slip of the tongue. Obama’s is a calculated government policy. Which is worse?