Sunday, June 07, 2009

War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength

Obama economic advisor Austin Goolsbee explaining the unemployment rate's recent jump to 9.4 percent is actually good news (from the corner):
[Goolsbee] says flashes of hope that we are on the verge of a revival have purportedly caused previously uncounted jobless people to seek (but not find) work — that is, they waited out prosperous times, deciding to leap into the job hunt only when hundreds of thousands of heretofore gainfully employed people got pink-slipped and began competing for a declining pool of jobs.
That seems eerily reminiscent of the environmentalists' insistence a few years back that record cold snaps were actually another symptom of "global warming." They flogged that one until reaching the limit of their declining credibility, then resorted to renaming "global warming" to the much more inclusive "climate change."

I imagine the Obama administration and its water carriers in the media will pursue a similar ploy: insisting that the rising unemployment rate is good news until the point is reached, say when the rate reaches ten percent, where credibility is stretched. They will then rummage around for an explanation not quite so contradictory, along the lines, perhaps, that after years of blatant Republican excesses, the economy is at last going through the difficult but necessary process of "right-sizing" itself.

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