President Obama and the Democrats are trumpeting the decline of the unemployment rate, but many people are confused by all the statistics. In general, statistics can't be trusted.
The steep losses finally stopped Wednesday as the stock market turned calm, a day after one of its biggest sell-offs of the year. Major indexes wavered between slight gains and losses in afternoon trading.
Poor corporate earnings reports pounded the stock market Friday in a sour end to an otherwise strong week of trading. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 200 points for its worst day in four months.
Some of the nation's leading manufacturing companies announced a new program Monday to help veterans gain the skills necessary to fill some of the estimated 600,000 high-tech manufacturing jobs that remain open because employers can't find qualified applicants.
It may have only been a bit of bad-mouthing typical of fans rooting for their home team, but former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch stirred up a hornet's nest of criticism from fellow businessmen and professional economists when he accused the White House of engineering a big drop in the nation's unemployment rate just a month before the presidential election.
Senior Romney campaign adviser Ed Gillespie dismissed questions Sunday about whether the Labor Department's unemployment figures have been manipulated for political purposes, saying, "The numbers themselves are very damning."
When conspiracists suggested Friday that the Obama administration had engineered a sharp drop in unemployment to aid President Barack Obama's re-election, the response was swift.
It says a lot when a government jobs report is so out of line with reality that no thoughtful person can take it seriously. At best the new unemployment number is a fluke; at worst it is the product of partisan hacks.
