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.
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