You know the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Well, here’s the rest of that saying: Try to fool me a third time, and I’ll kick you in the teeth.
Today is Election Day. And you might have heard that the economy (as always) is the main issue that will make people vote for one guy or the other. But that’s not quite the whole story.
The “economy” is too vague a way to describe what is on voters’ minds. The issue of jobs — pure and simple — will be what makes people either give President Barack Obama another four years in the White House or replace him with Republican Mitt Romney.
So today I’m going to talk about jobs.
When Obama took the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009, there were 131.555 million jobs in this country. Today, there are 134.792 million, although that figure could be revised up or down.
Those figures strip away all the fancy adjustments the Labor Department makes. But that total does not take into account that many of the new jobs are not full time or as well-paying as the ones in that existed before the financial crisis.
So the economy has added 3,237,000 jobs during the Obama administration. But that’s very slow growth and gets us nowhere near our peak employment of 139.090 million jobs in November 2007.
We are still 4,298,000 jobs short — even as the population of employment-age people grows at about 150,000 a month.
Voters will either give credit to Obama for the growth, or blame him for that growth that hasn’t occurred and the promises not kept.
But what’s more disturbing to me is the amazing run of good luck Obama has had on the jobs front over the past few months; three instances, to be precise.
I’ll leave the conspiracy theories to Jack Welch, former head of General Electric, who thinks the labor numbers are being rigged. I will just present the facts.
Let me start with last Friday’s numbers — the crucial employment roundup for October and the last major economic figure due before today’s vote.
Labor announced that 171,000 new jobs were created in October, a figure that was better than the “experts” expected and good enough for the president to tout in his last campaign stops.
But if you looked closely enough — and knew what you were looking at — you’d see a problem with that 171,000 figure.
The better-than-expected growth was mostly caused by a dramatic change in the seasonal adjustments used on the numbers. Without that change, growth in October would have only been around 100,000.
And that’s a figure the president would not have been bragging about.
Labor swore to me that nobody could have tinkered with the seasonal adjustments.
The second instance of good luck on jobs came in the September employment figures, which were released Oct. 5.
As I mentioned back then, the unemployment rate fell an astounding 0.3 percentage points to 7.8 percent largely because of an inexplicable jump in the number of young people who allegedly got jobs.
When the Census Bureau conducted that September survey for Labor, it discovered that 368,000 people between the ages of 20 and 24 had suddenly found work that month. Labor boxed a footnote in its report about the unusual occurrence but couldn’t — or didn’t — explain it.
The third instance was noticed by — I think — Reuters. In the week of Oct. 6, the initial claims for unemployment insurance (which is watched closely by the financial markets) suddenly dropped by 10 percent.
If you took the figure seriously, it looked like a sudden, last-minute improvement in the job market that would certainly help Obama. But then word started filtering out that the improvement was the result of one unnamed state that didn’t file its weekly paperwork on time.
California — a state that supports the president wholeheartedly — was rumored to be the lax filer. So I’m wondering: Does someone in DC deserve a kick in the teeth?
Personally, I think Obama spent too much time during his four years in the White House on things other than job growth. If he had fixed the employment situation, a lot of other economic issues would have corrected themselves.
I voted for Obama the last time, but I will not this election (provided, of course, that I can get to my voting place.)
I’m voting for Romney — in spite of his Wall Street credentials — because he has promised to get rid of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
Obama may be accused of desiring a redistribution of wealth, but it’s Bernanke — appointed by President George W. Bush — who has already started that redistribution.
And the Bernanke redistribution has been in a direction even Obama wouldn’t approve — from the poor and middle class to the rich.
By keeping interest rates near zero for years, Bernanke has been punishing the middle class and lower-income savers and rewarding people who are rich enough to speculate in the stock market — which Bernanke has been blatantly trying to push higher.
Sure, Bernanke has helped homeowners refinance mortgages.
But the benefits from that ended years ago.