IT'S STILL THE ECONOMY, STUPID

"Don't you bastards know success when you see it?"

 Although I understand Ben and Rush recently had a bit of a falling out, I still listen to the latter when in my truck during the show. AM radio reception just isn’t that good here at home in the bunker, not since that government drone accidentally crashed straight down the main ventilation shaft.

Anyway, Rush is always good at pissing off the left and producing absolutely hilarious self-righteous outrage amongst the members of the Propaganda Ministry and their government handlers, both of whom are unaware of and/or impervious to their own endless hypocrisy. They have to be or they would spontaneously combust.

This time, Rush has them up in arms about the “recovery” jobs and the fact that economically we live in a dying country. It’s dying in a number of other ways too, especially when it comes to individual liberty, but we’ll stick with the economy for the moment.

There’s an old saying, “Torture numbers and they will confess to anything.” Then there’s, “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” And Will Rogers gave us, “There’s liars, damned liars and statisticians.” Now we have all three wrapped up in an incestuous political-media relationship and torturing numbers in a way that would make Major Hochstetter green with envy. As in, what did the Nazi say to the clock that went tick-tick-tick? “Ve haf vays of making you tock!”

Feeble and pointless attempts at humor aside, Obama has been shouting into his MSM echo chamber the “good news” that he personally created 88,000 new jobs for Americans in March. When it comes to jobs and/or fictional jobs, 88,000 is an astronomical number. When it comes to government spending, however, it suddenly becomes less than a drop of piss in the ocean. At any rate, even using the government’s “adjusted” figures, even if there were 88,000 jobs “created”, 388,000 additional people went on unemployment last month. (We won’t even mention that the number of people who went on disability during the same time-frame, which if subtracted from the “good news” alone would bring the number of newly created jobs down to a little over 6,000.) So a net loss of 300,000 equals a “gain” and “recovery” of 88,000! Good new, good news! Oh happy days!

If George W. had turned in numbers half that bad, journalists and college professors would have been waving torches and pitchforks and leading the massed peasant revolt over the Whitehouse fence. Now, these same folks are gleefully popping champagne corks, firing off party favors and singing hosannas in the highest to celebrate another terrific month in an awesome recovery.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has no less than six officially recognized (aka visible to the public) ways to calculate unemployment, ranging from U-1 to U-6. As the government numbers go, the U-6 index most realistically reflects real unemployment here on Planet Earth, and usually stays at around twice as much as the U-1 numbers. I hear that new methods are being implemented even as we speak. For instance, the new U-7 calculation would use the standard U-1 number displayed in graph form and with the reader required to stand with his or her right leg two feet down a hole while reading it. Whatever the numbers, this system allows the O and his O-Bots to use whichever figure is the friendliest to their causes at the moment. Which, of course, is not enough.

After all the numbers are collected, no matter how dubious they are to begin with, they must be weighted or “adjusted” for “fairness”; fairness is measured as how favorable the data can make Obama look. To achieve fairness, you have to make various demographic assumptions to then adjust the already shaky numbers collected. For instance, the unemployment numbers for inner city black males under 25 years of age might need to be adjusted downwards from 25% to 5% to compensate for racism or the number of handi-capped blonde Latino lesbian Muslims who found work in the last month should be adjusted upwards from 2 to 12,397 since we can safely assume that said demographic is being sadly under-reported in the official statistics. Voila! We have just shaved a couple more percentage points from the unemployment rate!

So, even though there are at least 90,000,000 Americans not working, we are left with a delicious and heartening 7.6% unemployment rate. Even the pretend journalists of the MSM would have found such a figure worthy of a thoughtful frown or two under Bill “It’s the economy, Stupid” Clinton and it would have been Armageddon Plus Six under George W Bush. Today, though, it is somehow a gallant and heroic super-human achievement for the MSM’s main leg-tingler and a cause for more celebration over the never-ending recovery.

“…they were forced to eat Robin’s minstrels. And there was much rejoicing.”