WASHINGTON, D.C. — When the Department of Labor released statistics on job creation for the month of December 2015, showing roughly 293,000 new jobs created and unemployment holding at 5%, it sent the Republicans on The Hill scrambling because as one GOP staffer put it, “the horrors of Socialist Kenyan Sharia communism have taken root in America” and it has had the devastating impact they said, of creating nearly 300,000 jobs last month.
“What kind of capitalist economy can withstand such a brutal, socialist assault as to see all these hundreds of thousands of new jobs, created over multiple years now,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) asked rhetorically at an early morning press conference. Ryan said that “seeing Socialism brutalize our economy by adding a ton of jobs and keeping the unemployment rate steady at 5%” is tantamount to “King George riding in on a horse and forcing us to swear fealty to Communist Russia, and everyone can see that.” He further intimated that he’d look to impeach Obama “should his lawless communism continue to result in thousands of Americans finding work.”
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) said he flat-out does not trust the numbers. “Any right-winger will tell you that you can’t measure unemployment the same way with Obama, or any Democrat for that matter,” Gowdy said, ” as you do with a Republican president. You have to do things like lump in literally every single human being alive, whether they’re too young, too old, too sick, or too disabled to even hold a job, and then look at who’s not working.” Gowdy said that once you “fundamentally shift” how the unemployment rate is measured by “changing the way it’s been measured for decades” that, “You’ll see the real unemployment rate is like 25%, and you have wonder, why aren’t more toddlers working the fields? Simple answer there — liberal, anti-freedom policies that insist that four year olds shouldn’t work with farm equipment.”
“If the president does not stop his socialist campaign against American economic liberty,” Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said from the presidential campaign trail, “then we could have a true nightmare on our hands.” That nightmare, Cruz said, would come to pass “if Americans suddenly wake up to the fact that for all our rhetoric to the contrary, Democratic administrations shepherd our economy just fine.” Cruz further called the numbers into doubt as well. “Should we really trust the government’s employment numbers if it’s not a Republican in the White House,” Cruz asked, “I mean, isn’t that really the crux of the issue, that we just can’t trust that man because he’s bla — I mean, a black Democrat — I mean a Democrat?”
2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney told reporters when asked that he was “delighted” that Obama has gotten the unemployment rate “down to where Paulie and I said we’d have it by the end of our second term, which would be four years from now” but that he too is “concerned that Americans might wake up to the fact that Republicans are great with the economy, if you’re rich but not so much if you’re not,” which would be “disastrous” for Romney and his “squash buddies.”
When Obama took office in 2009, the economy was losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, and was in the middle of a free fall caused by the global economic meltdown. Unemployment was 7.8% in January of 2009 and peaked at 10% in October of that year, meaning that it has fallen by nearly half in the ensuing seven years.
