Okay, let me just come out and say this: I’m not a particularly political person. I’m really not. I pay attention, I try to stay informed, but all the crap that goes on gives me a headache. But you know what really grinds my gears? The kind of bullshit displayed above.
One of my friends reposted the picture above on Facebook (the original post is here), and while it’s perfectly sound for him to have his own political opinion, for some reason the numbers didn’t seem right to me. So I did some research.
Here’s what I found.
According to the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the total non-farm payroll employment increased by 175,000 people just in the month of February. Unemployment is currently at 6.7%, compared to 10.2% in October of 2009 which was the highest it had been in a solid 26 years. By the end of February, there were 10.5 million unemployed Americans in comparison to 12.5 million in February of 2009.
As for gas prices: welcome to capitalism. Gas prices are controlled by private companies, not by the government. The highest average gas price per gallon in 2009 was around $3, and it’s currently around $3.50. And while the government can try to manipulate those companies to lower gas prices per gallon, they ultimately don’t have control. Even then, that manipulation isn’t controlled by the President. If you really want to question a president about gas prices, maybe ask Bush why the average price for a gallon of gas mid-2008 was $4.12, the highest it’s been in the entire last decade.
The national debt is one place where I can’t exactly defend the Obama administration. Overall, our country is nearly $18 trillion dollars in debt. But what people may fail to realize is that those $18 trillion dollars have been accumulating for over 200 years and through two economic collapses! The amount of national debt added shot up during the Great Depression, but gradually lowered until the end of President Jimmy Carter’s first and only term in 1980. After that, the numbers began to shoot up again during President George Bush Sr.’s presidency. It dropped once again during President Bill Clinton’s presidency, but rose once more when President George W. Bush took office. While it has continued to rise during President Obama’s two terms, the road to bringing the nation back from an economic crisis shouldn’t be expected to be easy. Not to say that I agree with everything that our current President has done, but to quote author H.W. Brands, “Since George Washington, presidents have embraced public debt as an investment in America’s future.”
Now, as for the annual family income: that number is extremely hard to specify, given that each state has their own smaller section of government controlling various factors affecting rate of pay. For example, Washington (the state) has a minimum wage of $9.32 per hour, whereas Minnesota’s minimum wage is a significantly smaller $6.15 per hour. In addition to that, statistical graphs have shown that the median annual income has been on the decline since 2008, one year before Obama was even elected president. However, he is currently pushing for the minimum wage to be raised to $10.10 which would positively effect a lot of Americans.
In relation to the amount of Americans in poverty: did you know that 2014 marks 50 years since the “War on Poverty” was initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson? Although the Census Bureau calculated that the official poverty rate has only dropped from 19% to 15% over the past 50 years, a team of researchers at Colombia University have found different results. After adjusting for historical inflation, they figured out that the percent of people living in poverty has actually fallen from 26% in 1967 to 16% in 2012. Though a lot of people in other political parties may like to disagree, the Democratic policies put in place over the past 50 years have indeed been helping people.
With all that being said, here’s an actually accurate representation of what the Obama administration has done over the past 6 years:
Please, people, for the love of all things wonderful in this world… Do your research when you find things on the internet. Don’t accept things blindly.
