It was probably president envy (a rare form of penis envy) that prompted Barack Obama to lie to an audience in South Africa on Tuesday whom he told the U.S. economy was weak, despite low unemployment and brisk job numbers.
Lying about the economy is nothing new for Obama, who during his years in the White House relied on economic doubletalk — who can ever forget his metric of jobs “created or saved”? — but these days talking down the healthy economy is something of a perverse game among Democrats. Appearing on PBS’s “Firing Lines” on Wednesday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked by host Margaret Hoover whether 3.9% unemployment caused her to rethink her view that capitalism is not the best system for promoting the middle class.
“I think the [unemployment] numbers that you just talked about is part of the problem,” Ocasio-Cortez explained. “Because we look at these figures and we say that unemployment is low and everything is fine, right? Well, unemployment is low because everyone has two jobs. Unemployment is low because people are working 60, 70, 80 hours a week and can barely feed their kids.”
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Plenty of commentators on the Right picked up on this notion, noting that if everyone in America was working two jobs, the unemployment rate would be stratospheric owing to the principle of supply and demand.
In the meantime, some on the Left have seen Ocasio-Cortez’s “two jobs” statistic as the score to beat. On Thursday, Elizabeth Warren said during an interview on MSNBC, Warren that Americans are “two, three, or four jobs to try to pay the rent and keep food on the table.”
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As noted by The Daily Caller, PolitiFact countered the claim of both women, noting that one in 20 Americans actually works more than one job and that, on average, Americans are not working more today than they have in the past.
