Jobs, Jack Welch, And The Not So Liberal Press

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Posted by Bob Lord

So, the Wall Street Journal chose to give scumbag Jack Welch a platform from which to double down. You can read it here. Apparently, Welch's only remorse was that he didn't include question marks after his October 5th tweet recklessly accusing the President of manipulating the jobs numbers. Yeah right, Jack. That would have made it all ok.

Of course, Welch's accusations are tolerated in part because of the old saw that the press has a liberal bias. So, if a guy like Chris Matthews goes after Welch, he's just a liberal hack.

Unfortunately, Welch has won the battle. Although he's been appropriately called out for the reckless nature of his allegation, he's succeeded in sewing huge doubts about the accuracy of the latest jobs numbers. And this shows how not so liberal the press truly is.

We've all seen countless references to the supposed "fact" that we need to create 150,000 jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. So, when we have a month where, say, 100,000 jobs are created, douchebag Mitt Romney can go into attack mode. It's happened repeatedly. And the 150,000 magic number undergirds the case for doubting the 7.8% unemployment rate.

But the 150,000 number never was correct. The actual number of jobs needed monthly to keep pace with population growth used to be barely above 125,000, so dishonest conservatives rounded up to 150,000. A liberal press would have called them on this sleight of hand, but that didn't happen. Currently, however, the number of jobs needed to keep pace with population growth is down to 90,000 per month, as Paul Krugman explains here. But unless you read Krugman's column, you wouldn't know that, because the press really isn't all that liberal.

Of course, if you know that we only need to create 90,000 jobs per month to keep pace with population growth, you'd know that all these months in which we've been creating jobs at between 100,000 and 200,000 per month we'd be chipping away at the unemployment rate, which makes the 7.8% figure entirely unsurprising. But the not so liberal press just doesn't seem to want to go there.

Score one for Jack Welch.

4 thoughts on “Jobs, Jack Welch, And The Not So Liberal Press”

  2. You said ” If Obama was competent, we would have begun climbing out of this mess by now. Reagan and Clinton brought us out of deep recessions by the time of their reelections.”

    You are conveniently forgetting about Republican obstructionism throughout these four years. Incredible that you don’t mention this shitty tactic — I sure didn’t forget since I have been watching angrily as Republicans have trashed this country so that they would win the Whitehouse. Scummmy bunch of snot nosed kids those Republicans.

  3. No, of course I wasn’t serious. I was just testing out a half-baked theory of mine. But after reading your comment I see that Jack Welch is right. Obama couldn’t debate last Wednesday night so he and his “Chicago boys” spent the following 36 hours engaging in criminal conduct to manipulate the job numbers. Sounds entirely plausible. I don’t know why I couldn’t figure that out until you enlightened me, but thanks.

    I’m wondering, though. You say the Pulitzer Prize winning Larry Kudlow says we’re in a “horrible predicament.” By implication you seem to be saying that Obama put us in that predicament, with no help from GW Bush or the actions of the Federal Reserve (which I trust you agree Obama cannot control) over the past years. I can’t say I agree with your assessment (after all, I am a knucklehead), but I admire the confidence you have in your views, and those of Mr. Kudlow.

  4. Are you serious? Scum bag, douche bag? Why don’t you grow up. The liberal media never called Welch out because his numbers are on the money and it would just draw more attention to the Great One’s failed policies. I watch Krugman on Sunday’s and he couldn’t lean any more to the left. Why don’t you start reading a real economist like Larry Kudlow who’s not a liberal hack so you can get an idea of the horrible predicament that we’re in? Why is it that this economy is by far the worst of our lifetime? Why is it that the CBO AND IMF are forecasting dire economic conditions if something is not done immediately? If Obama was competent, we would have begun climbing out of this mess by now. Reagan and Clinton brought us out of deep recessions by the time of their reelections. That’s why both won second terms in landslides, because they implemented programs that righted the country. We’re devolving into a society that refuses to look at the facts of both sides and will support their candidate, no matter how inept. THEN YOU’VE GOT KNUCKLEHEADS WRITING BLOGS LIKE THEY ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON AND TOTALLY DISREGARDING REALITY in order to make sure that his guy continues to fail for another 4 years.. Like I said, Grow Up.

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