“The reason the unemployment rate is still as high as it is, in part, is because there have been huge layoffs of government workers at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level,” he said. “Teachers, police officers, firefighters, social workers– they have really taken it in the chin over the last several months. And so, what we’re trying to do is to see if we can stabilize the budget.”Jim Geraghty at NRO runs the numbers and shows that this is simply false. In fact, Geraghty opines, it's hard to imagine how it could be any more wrong than it was. At the very worst, total government layoffs amount to about 2% of current unemployment, and probably account for less than that.
I know. Mr. Obama is a postmodern kind of guy, and we need to remember that for postmoderns it's the narrative that matters, not something as out of fashion as truth, but doesn't it bother people that our President is either so uninformed or so dishonest that such whoppers have come to seem typical of him?
