How’s That “Change” Working Out For You?

by Ed Mattson

Wall Street is up…the Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P. Unemployment dropped to 8.3%. According to the Mainstream media, Obama, and all liberal and the Washington DC intellectuals who applaud BIG GOVERNMENT, are dancing like fairies in wonderland. Those who have longed for the day America joins the socialist democracies in Europe, can all take a sigh of relief…Obama the Messiah was right. His vision of changing America and his answer to whatever ails America can be solved by the federal government and is working. It is time for all of us to kneel on our blankets and bow toward the White House five times a day!

If all this is true and Obama is truly able to walk on water; that unemployment is really dropping like a sack of manure; that BIG GOVERNMENT is really the answer; and that our Founding Fathers concept with our experiment in free enterprise democracy has finally been dis-proven after creating the greatest nation the world has ever seen, then I must have missed something here.

I have been saying since I can remember that figures make liars out of those with good intentions and fools out of those who believe them. For those who believe the massaged numbers regarding the unemployment…sorry, but you are apparently drinking the Kool Aid.

Total non-farm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the unemployment rate decreased to 8.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.  Cheers! Let’s all celebrate.

HOWEVER…In the week ending January 28, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial unemployment claims was 367,000, a decrease of 12,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 379,000. Soon we will also have an influx of 900,000 veterans leaving the military and entering the workforce. Let’s see them cover those numbers up. Oh yeah, they will just be uncounted folks who won’t have jobs, because I don’t believe they will qualify for  unemployment insurance.

You were promised change…here’s your change by the numbers:

Thanks to how the government does its calculations, they can make the numbers infer anything they want. To say the numbers are being “fudged” in Washington, is no stretch of the imagination. Only in Washington can you lower the unemployment rate by increasing the number of those going back to work by 243,000, while at the same time you have an increase in new unemployment claims of 367,000. So the media, without any investigation buy into these glowing reports and believe we’ve made great headway…”unemployment has now dropped to 8.3%”…Right.

How can this be? To get the TRUE PICTURE, you have to look at ­ALL the numbers:

• 1.2 million people gave up looking for work in January. These are folks who dropped off the extended unemployment compensation insurance, gave up, or who took a part-time minimal wage job.
• Only 12.7 million are now officially unemployed if you listen to the mouthpieces in Washington, but the real number is over 17 million if you calculate back in the 4.7 who have stopped looking since Obama took office. We can’t blame The President for all those as it started before Bush left town, but we certainly shouldn’t be celebrating. As Yogi Berra said, “It ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings”.
• Obama is bragging that he added 3.7 million new jobs since the Bush era, but the reality is 4.3 million jobs have simply disappeared from the United States of America since Obama became President. 4.4 million jobs disappeared during the 2007-08 panic. But after Obama took office, an additional 4.3 million jobs disappeared. These were from jobs shipped overseas and in plant closings.
• So when Obama says “altogether, we’ve added 3.7 million new jobs over the last 23 months”, he’s not giving you the full story. We are still 5.6 million jobs below where we were at the peak in 2007. Add to that the 4.9 million new jobs that would have had to be created just to soak up new entrants into the workforce, and all told we have a jobs deficit of 10.5 million.
• When one adds in the 10.5 million who are working part time but would like to be working full time, we have 28 million who are unemployed or underemployed.  As far as the “official” unemployment number goes it is a big fat statistical lie.  The number for the real unemployment rate for 2011 was about 22.7%. (if unemployment was done the way Bureau of Labor Statistics did it before 1994) and probably over 19% so far for 2012.

According to the REAL VOICE ON WALL STREET, Investor’s Business Daily:

The president said: “We can’t go back to the policies that led to the recession. And we can’t let Washington stand in the way of our recovery.” And “We can’t go back to the policies that led to the recession”? We are told this is “our recovery”. The cause of the recession was, in fact, housing policies put in place by President Clinton and aggressively supported by Democrats in Congress, including former Sen. Barack Obama. How soon we forget. These were the policies that led to the housing meltdown, the financial crisis and, ultimately, the deep recession we’re still climbing out of, yet Obama’s “blame Bush” theme will be the Democrats’ strategy for the 2012 campaign. So get used to it.

The truth is, by now we should have created millions more jobs than we have. But Obama’s $836 billion stimulus, his botched industry bailouts, his failed “green” energy policies (Solyndra, et.al), his regulatory siege on business, and his disastrous attacks on Wall Street and entrepreneurs have made this the worst recovery in history.

These government “number slingers” are the same bunch that tells you the Consumer Price Index increased 3.0 percent before seasonal adjustment to end 2011. Let’s see… 3% inflation. Do you really believe that? Have you been shopping lately? Have you purchased gasoline or diesel for your vehicle so you could go to work (if you still have a job)? Oh, that’s right.  THEY DON’T COUNT GAS AND FOOD IN THE INFLATION RATE!  I guess we don’t need food or gasoline.

In most families the women do most of the grocery shopping right? Men usually aren’t always up to current grocery store prices. Next time anyone talks about politics and how things are going, just ask them if they have purchased ten pounds of potatoes this past year, or stopped in at a gas station.  In 2009, 10 lbs of potatoes cost about $3.50 in Western Michigan (about $3.00 at Wal-Mart). Today the cost is over $5 any place you want to shop. Gas was $1.79/gal when Obama’s entourage slithered into Washington and today, down at the local discount gas station here in North Carolina, it’s $3.59. Is it any wonder they DON’T CALCULATE FOOD AND GAS INTO THE CPI?

You know… I can show you how America can have a perfect 100% health rate meaning a rate where everyone in the country is perfectly healthy using the same “government calculation mentality”. First we exterminate everyone over the age of 50; then we take every one of all ages who is sick, mentally ill, or handicapped and ship them out of the country. Then we have to sterilize all women so we won’t have any children born with birth abnormalities, and what do you know…we end up with a population that is 100% healthy…Pretty simple.

If you think the government wants you to know the real numbers you must live on Mars or have been drinking the Kool Aid. If they came clean we would run all of them out of town. They have us speaking in terms of  TRILLIONS instead of millions when talking about the national debt and pretty soon a trillion will be as meaningless as a million. IT IS ALL FLIM FLAM. The average American is plain and simply numb with the whole charade.

Last week I showed you what a trillion dollars was in a real life picture (see: https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/2012/02/01/our-freedom-is-fragile-and-perilously-close-to-extinction/). Did you see it and study it? I then showed you the stack of money in $100 bills so you would see what our national debt looks like and get a “feel for it”. And finally I showed you what $114 trillion in our nation’s unfunded mandates looks like that will fall upon our children and grand-children’s shoulders. It can never be paid. America….WAKE UP! Your country’s going down the sewer and you ride along like a little kids on the merry-go-round.

The current administration and all those in the presence of the “king’s throne” are to blame. The voter is to blame. It hasn’t happened overnight or even over just with this administration, but has been geometrically compounded by a continual stream of pocket-padding, teat sucking, self-aggrandizing, politicians who have a sense of self-worth and importance that exceeds the rule of God Almighty.  America voted for change, but as my mother once warned, “be careful what you wish for”.  I didn’t vote for change and count myself as part of the loyal opposition. I guess that makes me a racist to those who have no common sense and see all issues as emanating from race, national origin, sex, sexual preference, or other politically correct parsing of the population.

Believe what you want and believe what you are told by the media. But it was a guilt-ridden America (remember slavery?) who elected the least qualified individual one could imagine to the highest office in the land. The Media went all in to get this guy elected. He had never so much as written out a paycheck, had to deal with payroll taxes, and had no business experience. He was a stealth candidate, or some say, “could he possibly be The Manchurian Candidate?” We elected a person who told us well in advance that he was going to “fundamentally change America”, and now we act surprised.

Ed Mattson

Following his service in the Marine Corps Ed Mattson built a diverse career in business in both sales/marketing and management. He is a medical research specialist and published author. His latest book is Down on Main Street: Searching for American Exceptionalism

Ed is currently Development Director of the National Guard Bureau of International Affairs-State Partnership Program, Fundraising Coordinator for the Warrior2Citizen Project, and Managing Partner of Center-Point Consultants in North Carolina.

Mr. Mattson is a noted speaker and has addressed more than 3000 audiences in 42 states and 5 foreign countries. He has been awarded the Order of the Sword by American Cancer Society, is a Rotarian Paul Harris Fellow and appeared on more than 15 radio and television talk-shows.