The actual unemployment figure is more like 11 or 12 percent and not the 7.8 percent figure released by the government, Rep. Mike Kelly, tells Newsmax TV.
The Pennsylvania Republican, a member of the House Oversight Committee, was commenting on Department of Labor statistics that showed the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent in September, dipping below 8 and posting the lowest unemployment rate since January 2009, the month President Barack Obama took office.
The numbers are widely viewed as a much-needed boost to the Obama re-election campaign following his poor performance in the first debate with GOP challenger Mitt Romney. However, Kelly does not believe the numbers will help the president.
“Where I’m from, there’s a lot of people who have given up looking for work altogether and a lot of people look at the unemployment rate and say, ‘You know what? That doesn’t make sense. I’ve been out of work for a long time but the job futures don’t look good to me.’ and a lot of people are wondering how they come up with these figures, and I say, ‘Well, you’ve got to understand that people who no longer are looking for work are no longer there and the true unemployment rate is probably somewhere around 11 or 12 percent.’
“So while it may give one campaign an opportunity to say things are getting better, the people out in the real world back by the beltway who are actually on the ground and trying to make a living and trying to get a job are still in that same situation and the automobile business, which I’m in, when we talk to people on the lot and in the showrooms, it’s the uncertainty of their future and the uncertainty of their job and the availability of their job or the ability to be making the same amount of money that keeps them from making that decision to make the purchase.”
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Kelly acknowledged the Obama campaign will hype the numbers but added, “The American people are starting to understand that the emperor truly has no clothes.”
“They’ve been gamed now for the last three and a half, almost four, years and they’re looking at things more realistically,” he said. “A campaign has a certain mission that it’s on and that’s always to take whatever it has to work with and try to spin it to make it look like something good is happening.I would just say that in the real world, the world that I come from and the world that I live in, it’s a lot more apparent to people that the future right now is too uncertain.”
On another issue, the attacks on U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt, Kelly said it is “another indication of dereliction of duty of an administration,” including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“She doesn’t walk away from this one,” he said. “To me, it’s been obvious that she has been absent from the podium when it comes to addressing this other than making the first claim that it was all because of a 15 minute YouTube piece that incited these people.”
Kelly believes the situation is likely to lead to hearings before the House Oversight Committee, adding, “The American people have the right to know and we have the responsibility to find out for them.”
“We have four Americans who have lost their lives,” he added. “There’s no excuse for a State Department or a secretary of state or our chief executive officer and commander in chief of our Armed Forces to be hiding and saying that they will get to it but they need to do a little more checking. This one does not pass the smell test and that is consistent with an administration that is really very amateurish in the way they’ve been running things.”
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