It is a beautiful thing being President Obama. You can pretty much say whatever you want and never be held accountable for it. Sure, a Washington Post fact-checker will dutifully note the brazen falsehoods. The media dutifully reports on most everything. But make Obama pay a political price for not telling the truth in a State of the Union address about the number of jobs created and number of ObamaCare enrollees?
Never.
Tuesday night, the president told Americans, “The more than eight million new jobs our businesses have created over the past four years.”
Nope.
[T]he data also show that since the start of his presidency, about 3.2 million jobs have been created — and the number of jobs in the economy still is about 1.2 million lower than when the recession began in December 2007.
Obama said: “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.”
Nope.
There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women — such as women tending to leave the workforce when they have children — make it difficult to make simple comparisons.
Obama is using a figure (annual wages, from the Census Bureau) that makes the disparity 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 — it is 14 cents — but then not every wage earner is paid on an hourly basis, so that statistic excludes salaried workers.
And finally, there was Obama’s shameless inflation of the ObamaCare enrollment numbers: “More than nine million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage.”
Nope.
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. …
The private insurance numbers — about 3 million — are also open to question. The troubled federal exchange counts people as enrolled if an individual has selected a plan, but it does not know if a person enrolled and paid a premium because that part of the system has yet to be built.
Obama’s falsehoods aren’t small things. He is using these falsehoods to manipulate American policy. And he will continue to do so and the media will continue to dutifully report his doing so. But he will never be made to pay a political price.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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