Lies and Lies

             It was a subtle lie, but a lie nonetheless. When the President in his State of the Union message bragged about 6 million new jobs having been added during his first term, he neglected to point out that the U.S. labor market has fallen by 6.4 million jobs since 2007. The official unemployment number of 7.9% is the same as it was when he took office, but if you count those who now only work part time and the 8 million people who have stopped looking for work in the last four years, the number is closer to 14%. The sad fact is that we have fewer people working a full-time job today than we had 30 years ago. No lie, no matter how subtle, can override this fact.

            The President's jobs initiatives have been a disaster. He asked for and received over $600 billion in stimulus money that he promised would create jobs, but that money was poured into a vast sink hole of special interests like Solyndra, electric cars, and other green energy projects that did nothing for the economy. He reduced drilling and exploration on public lands by a third, while using the EPA to destroy the coal industry and prevent new methods of extracting fossil fuels on private lands. He unleashed an unprecedented barrage of costly regulations that eat into small business profits and prevent them from expanding and creating new jobs. The list goes on.
            But the proposals keep coming, all with false assurances that "Nothing I'm proposing tonight [in his State of the Union message] should increase our deficit by a single dime." That is the same assurance he has given us repeatedly, beginning with Obamacare, which the CBO projects will cost taxpayers a trillion dollars over the next ten years. That he can continue to lie to us in this way after raising the national debt by $6 trillion dollars is mind-boggling.  There are subtle lies and damned lies. I think Obama has clearly moved from the one to the other.