Obama Laughs at Unemployment Numbers

Barack Obama had a brief moment of truth telling at a campaign event styled as a panel of his cronies in the business world. Sitting next to him was his bestie Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE and beneficiary of stimulus dollars and also one who ships jobs overseas. Barack Obama, commenting on the failure of the stimulus packages said that he misjudged the availability of all those "shovel ready jobs" we kept hearing about. You know, the jobs that all that stimulus money would allow to begin. Only there were no backlogs of shovel ready jobs. The conservatives in Congress knew that and were against the waste of millions of taxpayer dollars. Liberals who are of a different mindset about job creation - mostly they believe that the government is best at creating jobs - simply don't get it. And, when the predictable happens, it is so surprising to them.

In North Carolina, President Obama actually laughed when he made the truthful observation, as though it was a joke. This is the problem with both the President and the First Lady - they do not relate to situations as most Americans do. For whatever reason there are constant gaffes and faux pas galore as they wing it in the real world of politics on the big stage. If they were conservatives, they would be called stupid or out of touch and the like. But, the Obamas are given adjectives as fashionable, intellectual, worldly, and so forth. It is crazy.

While Barack Obama was laughing about the lack of work for millions of Americans with his very successful pals in the business world, there was the emergence of this report:

Twenty-eight months after Congress passed President Obama’s signature economic stimulus law, and nearly one year after he declared the summer of 2010 to be “Recovery Summer,” 1.9 million fewer people are employed.

In February 2009, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 141.7 million people were employed. By the end of May 2011 – the last month for which data are available – that number had fallen to 139.8 million, a difference of 1.9 million.

While the number of people with jobs has increased slightly from its low point during the recession – 137.9 million in December 2009 – those 1.9 million jobs have been lost despite $800 billion in stimulus spending.

This does not mean that the economy is not creating jobs, but rather that it is not creating jobs fast enough to keep up with a combination of layoffs and people entering the job market for the first time.

Hilarious, right?