Welcome to Obama's America, folks:
The head of the Gallup polling firm recently backpedaled on his claim that the official unemployment rate being trumpeted by the White House, Wall Street and the media is a "big lie."
Jim Clifton, the Chairman and CEO of Gallup, recently told CNBC that he was worried he might “suddenly disappear” if he disputed the accuracy of what the U.S. government is reporting as unemployed Americans, Wall Street on Parade reported.
“I think that the number that comes out of BLS [B[ull]...L[iberal] S[hit]] and the [Commissariat] of Labor is very, very accurate. I need to make that very, very clear so that I don’t suddenly disappear. I need to make it home tonight.” [emphases added]
Well. That's....interesting. Was Mr. Clifton's tongue firmly embedded in his cheek, was he "just joshing," or was he, as the old saying goes, "serious as an artificially-induced heart attack"? He did chuckle when he said it, but I cannot help but wonder.
Here's what Mr. Clifton previously wrote:
"None of them will tell you this: If you, a family member or anyone is unemployed and has subsequently given up on finding a job — if you are so hopelessly out of work that you've stopped looking over the past four weeks — the Department of Labor doesn't count you as unemployed," the venerable firm's chief executive officer and chairman last week wrote in his blog.
"Right now, as many as thirty million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren't throwing parties to toast 'falling' unemployment."... [emphases added]
That, gentles, would translate to a true unemployment rate of approximately 19%.
"There's no other way to say this," he writes.
"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."...
“When the media, talking heads, the White House and Wall Street start reporting the truth — the percent of Americans in good jobs, jobs that are full time and real — then we will quit wondering why Americans aren't ‘feeling’ something that doesn't remotely reflect the reality in their lives," Clifton writes. [emphases added]
I'll ask the questions we're all thinking: How does Mr. Clifton's blog post square with what he said on CNBC? What happened between the former and the latter to "convince" him to change his tune 180 degrees? And do we really have to wonder all that much just exactly what that was?
No comments:
Post a Comment