Obama can't deny bleak numbers

To the editor:

After watching President Obama on the television calling for Congress to "pass this jobs bill" for a couple of weeks, I looked on the Internet to review the bill (house.gov) and noted that it wasn’t there.

Later I looked again and found the bill posted, however it was sponsored by a Texas Republican. I called Rep. Robert Hurts’ office to ask why a Republican had sponsored the president’s bill, they laughed and told me that no Democrat would sponsor the bill so the Texas congressman had put in a jobs bill with the same title, but it had 12 pages instead of Obama’s 175.

Later, I learned that, as of the first of February, the House of Representatives had passed more than 25 jobs bills, many of them bipartisan, but that none of them was being considered by the Senate. I called Sen. Jim Webb’s office, and they confirmed my information but refused to give me any reason why the Senate would not consider any of the jobs bills. The only thing I can think is that Obama wants to have an issue of a "do-nothing" Congress to campaign on, and Sen. Mark Warner and Webb are going along.

The last couple of weeks, I have seen the president on television touting the figures on unemployment. Another search on the Internet at the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that when Obama took office in January 2001, the number of jobs was 134,383,000 and by December 2011 the number was 131,900,000, which is 2.5 million less.

How can the unemployment figure be going down when more than 2.5 million people have lost their job? Further, each month the "weekly unemployment claims" are posted, and they are always more than 325,000 and then the monthly gain in jobs is published and when it’s 220,000 the unemployment number goes down. How is that possible?

I think they just drop the people who fall off unemployment and ignore the total jobs number.

My father, who ran his own business, used to say that "figures don’t lie, but liars figure." I suspect that by November we will have full employment.

JOHN BRUNS