Last Friday, the president addressed the jobs report for October 2010.  The White House followed up his speech with a blog posting about the jobs numbers on the White House website.  Both were equally deceptive.

The American private sector work force picked up 159,000 jobs in October but unemployment didn’t budge.  This is because our population continues to grow and in order for the unemployment to go down, according to CNN Money, we need to add more than 150,000 jobs a month just to keep the unemployment level steady.  Obama of course cheered the numbers as a sign of improvement.  He’s right to some degree, but what was most telling was a comment included in his remarks that was obviously meant to allay the concerns of many of his supporters.  He said, “I won’t be satisfied until everybody who is looking for a job can find one.”  Most would read that to mean that he wouldn’t be satisfied until everyone out of work is working again.  But his policies belie that.  Just about every policy Obama has pushed has had some undercurrent of wealth redistribution.  The New York Times even crowed in March that his crowning achievement, Obamacare, was the biggest piece of social legislation to address income inequality since Medicare.  If you read that statement as Obama intended it, he is telling those who don’t want to work, for whatever reason, that he is not expecting them to have to work.  It sounds like a good thing, but the underlying message is intended to allay the fears of that portion of his constituency that believes they somehow deserve to be taken care of, either because they feel they were dealt an unfair hand in life, or because they are just simply too lazy to work and are using some social crutch to justify that position.

The second deception occurs on the blog posting that discussed the speech containing the above deception.  The blog posting contains a bar chart that show the number of jobs lost or gained, in thousands, each month starting in January 2008.  The bars are colored to represent the “Previous administration” and the “Obama administration”.    In January 2008, under Bush, we lost 12,000 jobs and increased until the last month under Bush, when we lost 806 thousand jobs.  That was when the bleeding stopped and the job losses started decreasing.  From February 2009 until November 2009, job losses decreased until in November we actually had a job gain.  The only reason the chart is shown in two colors is to make it appear that the Obama administration had something to do with the turn-around.  However, in just about every other facet of governing, Obama has laid any existing problems at the foot of the Bush administration.  Is it fair for Obama to take credit for the turn-around when it was obviously the strategy and policies put in place at the end of the Bush administration that stopped the bleeding?  It’s just another attempt of the Obama administration at trying to take credit for something they had no idea how to fix.  Hopefully, fresh eyes in Congress will keep the “current administration” from doing anything to jeopardize future job growth.