Politicians live and die by numbers, statistics, polls and data. So if the results of your programs don’t yield numbers that are favorable and supportive, what do you do? Simple, you change the way those numbers are calculated or change the definition of what you are trying to accomplish. This is how the Obama administration and other Liberal politicians improved optics to justify taking action or support an action they already implemented.
When the Obama administration first came under fire for their failed immigration policy execution, they came back with, “Deportations are higher under the Obama administration than they ever were during the Bush administration”. This was a true statement only because the Obama Justice Department changed the definition of “deportation”. Up till then, deportation was a legal action, directed in and by a court where an individual was directed to be removed forcibly from the country. But the Obama Justice Department changed the definition of “deportation” to include people that were stopped at the border and immediately turned around and not allowed to enter the country.
Unemployment numbers improved painfully slow during Obama’s first term. In spite of the wondrous Stimulus program, unemployment stayed nearly the same. To help the numbers get better before his reelection, people whose unemployment payments ran out and were still unemployed were considered to have “left the work force” and were no longer counted as unemployed. Thus, the unemployment rate improved.
What wasn’t reported for a long time was the number of people “under employed”, those that took a job at a much lower salary in order to have a job. Or those that worked two part-time jobs to make ends meet or those that were only working part-time.
Another unreported statistic was “workplace participation”, the percentage of working age Americans that were actually working or looking for work. Today, that rate is only 62.8%, the lowest since 1978 under President Carter.
So how are the 37.2% of working age Americans that aren’t participating in the workforce getting by? Well, 21.3% or 52.2 million Americans are on some kind of government support program; up from 18.6% or 42.0 million ten years ago. Another 8.5 million get money from the Social Security’s disability insurance program; doubling the number receiving payments in the late 90’s.
Will the day eventually come when people receiving disability or other government assistance be considered “employed”?
An interesting side note, people in Seattle benefiting from the local increase in the minimum wage to get them off of government assistance are asking to work less hours because if they make too much money, they will lose their government assistance.
The first scandal to surface early in Obama’s first term was the Fast and Furious debacle. In order to justify the operation, the Obama Justice Department reported that 90% of the weapons recovered in anti-drug operations in Mexico came from the United States. This statistics was repeated over and over, but it wasn’t true because they left out the word “traceable.
According to the BATF, in 2007-2008 the Mexican government recovered 29,000 guns at crime scenes. Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Only 6,000 were successfully traced. Of those 6,000 successfully traced, 5,114 were found to have come from the U.S. which is 17% of the total guns recovered but 90% of the “traceable” guns recovered. In other words, 83% of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.
The Gross Domestic Product or GDP has long been an indicator or measure of how our economy is doing. Quarterly increases in the GDP of 2% to 5% are considered good. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has consistently show fractional increases of less than 1%. In May, when the GDP for the first quarter (+0.2%) was revised into the negative (-0.7%), the Obama Administration took action. They didn’t implement programs to improve the economy; they just changed the formula for calculating the GDP. With the new formula, the GDP for the first quarter was revised yet again back to the positive.
Another observation, the Obama Administration has a habit of revising numbers like GDP or unemployment rate in a negative direction months after they are first reported when they are less noticeable.
Chicago, the Liberal paradise of the mid-west is changing how they report crimes. By re-classifying deaths into lower categories, they can claim that “2014 had the lowest murder rate since 1966.” Investigations by Chicago Magazine and TV station WGN have determined that the murder rate for 2014 was only two lower than the year before. In an attempt to put a better face on a bad situation, Chicago Police now report the number of “shooting incidents” not the number of people shot in an incident.
Liberal Gun Control groups have long defined their own terms like “gun deaths”, “violent gun deaths” and “gun victims” when generating their own statistics in order to get their number up. What they don’t always publicize is what numbers are included in that definition. When I hear the term “violent gun deaths”, I think of innocent persons killed during robberies, home invasions or homicides. Gun control groups will routinely include accidental gun deaths, suicides, criminals killed by police, criminals killed by civilians and criminals killed by other criminals. Two drug dealers shoot each other in a drug deal gone bad and that should limit my access to firearms! They might as well have a category: Americans killed by guns and include US Soldiers and Marines shot and killed in Iraq and Afghanistan; after all, they are Americans and they were killed by a gun.
I think I’ve made my point. In summary, before you buy into “things are really getting better” or “all guns are evil” consider the source and look a little deeper.
See also: Figures Don’t Lie…… and I Like Numbers