All great magicians employ misdirection to create
miraculous illusions, leaving their audiences stunned and confused. President
“Houdini’s” miraculous creation of 873,000 jobs in the month of September
magically drove down the national unemployment rate from 8.1% to 7.8%, just as
absentee voting begins. The trick left Republicans and economists equally
befuddled, since the last time a similar monthly jobs increase appeared
was June
of 1983 when the economy was growing at an astronomical 9.3% annual rate. But looking behind
Barack the Great’s smoke and mirrors reveals that the President’s highly
controversial July suspension of the “workfare” requirements that welfare
recipients must actually do real work to be counted as employed seems to have
dramatically reduced the U.S. Labor Department’s unemployment rate.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes two monthly surveys that
measure employment levels and trends: the Current Population Survey (CPS), also
known as the “household survey”, and the Current Employment Statistics (CES)
survey, also known as the “payroll survey”. With most economists
estimating the current U.S. economic growth at an anemic 1.5%, it seemed ludicrous
that the Obama Administration could report a monthly gain of 873,000 jobs in
the household survey, just short of the all-time record 900,000 jobs gain in
June of 1983, when under President Ronald Reagan the economy was growing 6
times faster at 9.3%. In fact, the same household survey
report showed a recessionary slide of 195,000 jobs in July and another 119,000
decline in August. Adding to the suspicions regarding the
credibility of the household survey, the more reliable “payroll survey” that
tracks the rate of jobs growth through IRS withholding data was unchanged from
last month.
After the report, the internet “blew-up” with conspiracy theories that
the employment numbers must have been consciously manipulated by the U.S. Labor
Department to help the President’s reelection odds. Even the
highly-respected former CEO of General
Electric, Jack Welch, tweeted: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do
anything..can’t debate so change the numbers.”
Like all spell-binding illusions, the real set-up for this phenomenally
great employment report was engineered back on July 12, 2012, when the Obama
Administration announced an Executive Order that eliminated President
Bill Clinton’s highly-praised workfare reform that required welfare
beneficiaries to get real job in order to continue to receive payments. According to former Clinton
Advisor Dick Morris, in 1996 Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott
stated: “I don’t want
anyone going to a truck drivers’ school that advertises on a matchbook cover
and avoiding work.” The Republicans included 42 U.S.C. § 615(a)(2)(B) in the Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families (TANF) reform legislation to
make sure every states’ welfare recipients were required to work in a real job
and also inserted section 607 to prevent future secretaries of Health &
Human Services (HHS) from waiving the real workfare requirement.
With 1.4 million of the two million families receiving TANF payments not
actually in real jobs, Obama took heat for changing the work rules. The Heritage Foundation warned:
“in
the past, state bureaucrats have attempted to define activities such as
hula dancing, attending Weight Watchers, and bed rest as ‘work.’ These
dodges were blocked by the federal work standards. Now that the Obama
administration has abolished those standards, we can expect
‘work’ in the TANF [welfare] program to mean anything but work.”
Presidential candidate Mitt
Romney, a former governor, howled “the linkage of work and welfare is essential to prevent welfare
from becoming a way of life.” Republican Congressional leaders screamed the waiver was a “blatant
violation of the law” by allowing states to substitute “vocational
educational training or job search/readiness programs” to “count as well”
in meeting the work requirements.
But as the heat dissipated and the campaign news cycle moved on,
President Houdini was positioned to triumph. No one knows just how many
of the up to 1.4 million TANF welfare recipients have now been re-designated by
the states government as “employed”, but isn’t it just magical how 873,000
people started working last month.
Is Barack Obama really the new Ronald Reagan?
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