One can only imagine how the Obama White House is scrambling to spin this direct attack on its integrity by the head of one of the world’s biggest and most respected polling and business consulting organizations.
Calling the government’s unemployment figures “extremely misleading,” the chairman and CEO of Gallup says the improving jobs picture in America gleefully promoted by the Obama administration and its media cheerleaders is nothing more than politically driven propaganda.
In fact, writes Gallup’s Jim Clifton on his company’s website, unemployment in the United States is actually so bad that the 5.6% figure touted by Obama should be much higher if the whole truth were told.
“The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.”
Only last month, in remarks made in Knoxville, TN, President Obama took a rhetorical victory lap, boasting about his administration’s supposed success in creating much-needed jobs for unemployed Americans.
Via the official White House website, we are given a view of the American economy through Obama’s rose-colored glasses as he took credit for a falling unemployment rate in late 2014:
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“In December, our businesses created 240,000 new jobs. Our unemployment rate fell to 5.6 percent, which is the lowest in six and a half years.
What that means is, 2014 was the strongest year for job growth since the 1990s. Unemployment fell in 2014 faster than any year since 1984.”
And of course, who was the president in 1984? Why, Republican Ronald Reagan, of course.
While Obama and his supporters have been trumpeting the apparent improvement in the country’s jobs situation, many Americans as well as leading GOP lawmakers have been saying the employment picture is not nearly as bright as the administration would have us believe.
Now, the scathing post by the top official at Gallup — an organization that regularly tracks the health of the economy as measured by employment — supports the doubters’ skepticism about the smoke-and-mirrors unemployment stats.
The Hot Air coverage of the Clifton post notes that Gallup’s real-world analysis:
“…has determined that only 44.1 percent of the whole American population is working more than 30 hours per week. Gallup pegs the underemployment rate (part-time workers) at 15.9 percent of the public and has calculated the real unemployment rate at 7.1 percent.”
So far, there’s been no official White House response to the Gallup chief’s claim that rips apart Obama’s cherished story about his success in leading the comeback for America’s job seekers — a tall tale that Jim Clifton bluntly labels the “Big Lie.”