The U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 10.2% in October, topping the 10% mark for the first time in 26 years, the Labor Department reported Friday. Nonfarm payrolls dropped by a seasonally adjusted 190,000 in October, bringing to total number of jobs lost in the recession to 7.3 million. It was the 22nd straight decline in payrolls….The report was worse than expected. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch were forecasting a rise in the unemployment rate to 10%, with 150,000 lost payroll jobs.

That’s the highest since 1983.
I have been posting these numbers for the last 3 or 4 months here on our blog, and they are always “worse than expected.”  When you have an economically illiterate president, Treasury Secretary, and Fed Chairman, the public is left consoling itself with an alleged “number of jobs saved” from a huge spending stimulus bill.  And what of those jobs?  As Nobel Laureate and liberal luminary Paul Krugman points out, many of them are public sector union jobs (i.e., teachers): “If you want to see the recovery act in action, visit a classroom: your local school probably would have had to fire a lot of teachers if the stimulus hadn’t been enacted.”

Ladies and gentlemen, the Obama/Biden recovery!

Here’s why jobs “saved or created” is shameless rhetoric:

1. There’s no way to count the number of jobs “saved or created” by stimulus spending. The way the Obama administration comes up with the 150,000 figure is to basically assume that x amount of government spending creates a y number of jobs and just declare it so.

2. The second reason is related to something I call the Instant Billionaire Formula™. I claim that with the Instant Billionaire Formula™, anyone can become a billionaire, instantly! Here’s how it works… ready? Okay, write yourself a check for one BILLION dollars! And presto, you’re a billionaire! Of course, what I failed to mention to begin with is that applying the Instant Billionaire Formula™ costs a billion dollars (you just wrote yourself a check, remember?), so overall, your net worth really doesn’t change. But if we just look at the positive side of things, then, wow, yes, you just became a billionaire! Similarly, the government can create any number of jobs by taking money from someone and giving it to someone else for say, digging a ditch and filling it back up. But considering government’s propensity for waste, is there any net gain here? How many jobs are lost due to the stimulus spending, which is money that needs to be somehow taken out of the economy before it’s put back in? How productive are the jobs “saved or created” in relation to the jobs “forsaken or destroyed”? These are questions we must answer before we can claim 150,000 were “saved or created” while the net job loss is in the millions.

I’m sure that if President Bush had tried the “saved or created” trick, he would have been ridiculed to no end.