TRUTH REVOLT Excerpt: Many of the facts President Obama presented during Tuesday evenings State of the Union address were either exaggerated or flat out false. Below are some of the most blatant errors made by the President compiled from different fact-checking organizations, such as Politifact and Glenn Kessler, Washington Posts fact checker, as well as other sourced research. Climate Change: The President said, But we have to act with more urgency – because a changing climate is already harming western communities struggling with drought, and coastal cities dealing with floods. According to the UN IPCC, the climate watching organization, it has not gotten warmer for the past 16 years, so climate change couldnt have created drought and flooding since the time Bill Clinton was president. More recently scientists have said that droughts and flooding are not more frequent or worse than normal. Jobs: Obama claimed, more than 8 million new jobs our businesses have created over the past four years. While its true that nearly 8.2 million private sector jobs have been added since February 2010, which was the low point of the great job slump that began a year before Obama took office and continued through his first year. Overall, the net job gain since he took office stood at just over 3.2 million as of the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for December. Manufacturing Jobs Created: According to the President, “A manufacturing sector that’s adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s.” The low point for manufacturing jobs was reached in January 2010, and there has been a gain of 570,000 jobs since then. The Bureau of Labor statistics reports the number of manufacturing jobs is still 500,000 fewer than when Obama took office in the depths of the recession, and the gain in manufacturing actually has begun to stall a bit in the past year. The only reason Obama can tout a gain in manufacturing jobs “for the first time since the 1990s” is because manufacturing jobs have been in decline since long before the recession. Obamacare: The President said that because of the Affordable Care Act … more than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage. Obama carefully does not say these numbers are the result of the Affordable Care Act, but he certainly leaves that impression. But the Medicaid part of this number—6.3 million from October through December — is very fuzzy and once earned a rating of Three Pinocchios from WAPOs Glenn Kessler. Also, Obama didnt claim that all of those signing up for coverage had been uninsured, and, in fact, we know that not all of them were. A big slice of the signups may come from the 6.2 million people who lost their coverage because of Obamacare. The Gender Earnings Gap: The claim in the speech was, “Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.” First of all the President didnt mention that women who work in the White House, make 87 cents for every dollar a man makes. Overall while the president is correct when he says a gender gap in wages is wrong, he exaggerated the problem. Per the WAPO fact-checker, Obama was using a figure (annual wages, from the Census Bureau) that makes the wage gap appear the greatest. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, shows that the gap is 19 cents when looking at weekly wages. The gap is even smaller when you look at hourly wages (14 cents) but then not every wage earner is paid on an hourly basis, so that statistic excludes salaried workers. In other words, since women in general work fewer hours than men in a year, the statistics used by the White House may be less reliable for examining wage discrimination. Weekly wages is more of an apples-to-apples comparison, but it does not include as many income categories. Deficit: When Obama said the federal deficits have been cut by half he was being honest. But he neglected the fact that deficits remain at historically high levels and it was his administration which brought them up to the high levels. When Obama took office in 2009, he inherited a projected deficit of $1.4 trillion. Keep in mind that $800 billion of that deficit came from Obamas stimulus plan which was passed and paid for in the 2009 fiscal year but since Bush was the president at the beginning of the fiscal, it gets credited to his presidency. Deficits remained over $1 trillion for the next three fiscal years. The deficit for fiscal year 2013 (ending Sept. 30) fell to $680 billion. Thats indeed less than half the 2009 figure, but its still higher than any full-year deficit for any previous president. The previous record was $459 billion in fiscal 2008, under President George W. Bush. During the five years of the Obama presidency the national debt (not including the stimulus) grew by almost $7 trillion, approximately $2 trillion more than every president from Washington to Clinton combined. And at the rate he is spending, after two full terms he would have grown the deficit as much as every president from Washington-Bush combined. Domestic Oil and Gas production: For the first time in nearly 20 years, there is more oil produced at home than we buy from the rest of the world. Thats true. The latest figures from the nonpartisan experts at the Energy Information Administration show domestic oil production averaged 7.5 million barrels per day last year, while net imports of petroleum averaged 6.2 million barrels. And thats the first time since 1992 that domestic production exceeded net imports. However that boom in oil/gas production is because of fracking, the new technology using horizontal drilling and not any government policy. One of the Presidents first acts after his first inauguration was cancelling fracking leases for more study. In fact most of the new drilling is happening on state-owned rather than federal lands...
Posted on: Thu, 30 Jan 2014 04:31:25 +0000
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