Fox Tweeted A Really Biased Trump-Obama Comparison And They’re Getting Torn To Shreds

Don’t let the recent decision by FOX News to drop anchor Bill O’Reilly amid sexual harassment lawsuits change your opinion of them, they’re still not a very reliable source for news. And yesterday, they gave the perfect example of why they shouldn’t be trusted by tweeting out this comparison of the jobless rates after 100 days in office for the most recent four presidents.

Trump Shouldn’t Focus on Job Growth. The New Numbers Show Why.

Wage growth — more specifically, average hourly earnings for private-sector employees — seems poised to grow, and this would represent true progress for American workers.

Then there is the direct measure of how many Americans are working, the employment-to-population ratio. You can refine it to include only those who are between 25 and 54 to filter out students who aren’t working because they are in school and retirees who are on the golf course.

 

A Time for Immodest Proposals

But often the newest attempt at a new right offers a rhetoric of nationalism that cashes out in policies not obviously bolder than what reform conservatism offered.

.. So as an experiment, I thought I’d write a few columns (an intermittent series, as events permit) floating genuinely radical visions of how policy makers might respond to our order’s slippage toward something worse than stagnation. These will not be ideas that I find entirely convincing, they will not be fully fleshed-out, and I will disavow responsibility if they’re ever put into disastrous practice.

.. So an emergency response would set a more ambitious goal: a swift boost in work force participation and family formation, using a few sticks and a lot of very expensive carrots.

.. The sticks would include cuts to disability and unemployment benefits and tighter Medicaid eligibility rules for the able-bodied — not as “pay fors,” but simply to make sustained worklessness less pleasant.

.. The scale of spending means this proposal gores more conservative oxen than liberal ones. But that’s only because I’m saving a related proposal to ban pornography and video games for a later installment in this series — which I promise will only grow more outlandish as it grows.

The trouble with Democrats’ infrastructure job promises

Their $1 trillion construction spending plan is supposed to create 15 million jobs. Don’t count on it.

In 2011, the unemployment rate for construction workers hovered around 15 percent, while the overall unemployment rate was around 9 percent. So there were plenty of unemployed workers who would jump at a chance for a job rebuilding a road or fixing up a school. That’s not the case today: The unemployment rate for construction workers has plummeted to around 5 percent, while the overall unemployment rate is 4.7 percent. Those numbers are near what economists consider “full employment”—any lower, and inflation could start to rise. In fact, in the construction industry itself, experts are more worried about a shortage of workers than a surplus.

.. Second, if the Democrats’ infrastructure proposal does provide a huge stimulus to the economy, its effects would likely be offset—deliberately—by the Federal Reserve. In 2011, the Fed had set interest rates at essentially 0 percent. If the government had launched a major infrastructure plan, the Federal Reserve would surely have welcomed it—in fact, Ben Bernanke, then the chair of the Fed, had been imploring Congress to do more to stimulate the economy.

.. That doesn’t mean a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan is a bad idea. There are good structural reasons to rebuild America’s roads, bridges and airports. And it’s possible that a future economic crisis will cause millions of construction workers to lose their jobs, forcing the Fed to drop its interest rate back to zero.