Embrace the jobs report, Mitt!

By A.J. DiCintio

In August, a Rasmussen poll found that a landslide majority of likely voters (59%) believed media bias on behalf of Barack Obama's reelection efforts would continue through Election Day.

With September in the books and the first two weeks of October revealing the same old tactics of the same Old Media, it's abundantly clear those honest voters were absolutely correct, especially if we consider how their conclusions apply to how the lemmings called media liberals are covering up the truth about the election's singularly most important issue: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

Since last Friday, for example, the incestuously imitative mob has been huffing and puffing hot, noxious air from anchor desks, front and editorial pages, and headlines of major Internet websites (where the AP's liberal agenda reigns supreme) in a shamelessly insulting effort to inflate and then float the propaganda balloon that last week's "positive" jobs report has given Barack Obama a "boost."

So, if not from the slobbering television sets of NBC, CBS, and ABC news, the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, or the home pages of ostensibly neutral websites such as Comcast and Yahoo, where can the voting public get honest facts about jobs and middle class income?

One answer is this:

From honest, independent thinking, data-driven experts such as the estimable John Mauldin, whose insights are available gratis at MauldinEconomics.com.

Like other fair-minded citizens who scratched their heads over the unemployment rate published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Mauldin was also "surprised" by a drop in unemployment that sent him thinking "Show me the data" and concluding there had to be "something interesting lurking down among the details."

And something more than merely interesting there is, according to the Texan who is an indefatigable financial analyst, writer, speaker, and traveler.

But it isn't a conspiracy by the BLS; for as Mauldin points out, such an effort would require the complicity of a number of people so large that a parade of whistleblowers would have been blowing their whistles long before the report hit the news.

It's true, agrees Mauldin, that the report's number does seem to result from a conspiracy. But in reality, he informs us, it results from a cause much less dramatic and infinitely more important.

Specifically this:

Noxious New Math imposed upon it by Congress explains why the BLS found the unemployment rate falling despite the increasingly feeble economy.

You haven't looked for a job in the past four weeks? The BLS incredibly must remove you from the workforce. Same goes if you've been out of work for 366 days or more.

In fact, during the past four years, the BLS has removed millions of citizens from the workforce, a practice that will one day reduce the number of people looking for work to zip, thereby permitting Washington's politicians to scream a trillion "I told you so's" about the country's 0% unemployment rate.

The truth is, therefore, that if the agency were using the old, common sense math it employed in the eighties and before, it would find the current unemployment rate at least in the 12 percent range.

However, if the agency were directed to use its own real "U-6" number regarding unemployment, which takes into account the economic disease called "underemployment," it wouldn't have announced a fake rate of 7.8% but an all too real number of 14.7%.

Regarding that shocking BLS statistic, note that at both Columbia and Harvard, Barack Obama must have religiously (make that "scrupulously") cut classes in Underemployment 101 and Underemployment 401, respectively.

After all, over the past four years he has remained as quiet as a church mouse (make that "government building mouse") regarding the Underemployment Tragedy that afflicts millions of job seekers across the employment spectrum, including, as Mauldin points out, 50% of college graduates.

Making Obama all the more quiet about job reality are these additional facts:

To date we have recovered only 48% of the jobs lost in the recession.

At the current rate of job growth, it will take a minimum of three recession free years just to get back to where we were in total job numbers when Obama took office.

The percentage of the U.S. working population continues to fall steadily, again telling us that real unemployment is "well over 12%" and that "we're not even close to [the job totals of] 1999."

But the country's job problem is not just about the number of jobs being produced; it's also about the quality of the jobs.

Here again, using the Bureau's own charts, Mauldin brings into the light truths the liberal media is happy to keep under a leaden bushel.

For instance, the fact that for the past three years the economy has averaged about 140,000 new jobs per month at salaries between $20,000-40,000 while it lost an average of 40,000 jobs per month that pay "more than $70,000."

The fact that throughout this "recovery" one-third to one-half of new jobs have been created in what Philippa Dunne of the Liscio Report calls "Our old friend the eat, drink, and get sick sector." (Bars, restaurants, and low pay health care.)

And the fact that during Obama's term, average income is "up only 0.2% . . . which means workers are losing ground [to inflation]."

Finally, there is the incontrovertible fact that to turn the jobs and income problem around, we have to grow the private sector economy "over 3% per year for a decade" if we are to have any chance of affording "the level of government that we want."

Because of his miserable economic record, candidate Obama isn't interested in those facts, preferring, instead, to continually slime his opponent while taking every opportunity to extol the beauty of big, centralized government, even to the ridiculous extent of obsessing about a cash-flush performer named Big Bird.

That's why in the face of the slime and the superficiality, Mitt Romney needs to embrace the jobs report in its profound totality and speak about it calmly, thoughtfully, and respectfully at every opportunity, including every time Obama slimes his slime to divert the public from the jobs issue and every other aspect of the economic morass in which he has mired the nation.

But not just Mitt, for as the same Rasmussen poll reveals, 48 percent of likely voters trust friends and family regarding information about the election and just 26 percent the media.

For good reason, there are many school buildings in this country above whose entrance is chiseled, "The truth shall set you free."

To free this nation dangerously stuck in Barack Obama's economic mire, it's imperative we Main Street Americans also commit ourselves to calmly telling the economic truth, including the truth about the real job picture, to family, friends, and as many others as we possibly can.

© A.J. DiCintio