Bush's Last Month Sees Unemployment Hit 22%, According to Wingnuttia's Math

By David Sirota

Created 01/09/2009 - 11:36pm

Per the discussion on the right-wing's efforts to slander Franklin Roosevelt, note that though the Bureau of Labor Statistics today [1] reports that the unemployment rate in President Bush's last month is 7.2 percent, if you use the same kind of absurd math conservatives use to berate the New Deal, then the unemployment today is actually around 22 percent.

As University of California historian Eric Rauchway has noted [2], Wingnuttia's leading FDR slanderers like Amity Shlaes and Thomas Sowell base their claims that unemployment during the New Deal didn't go below 20 percent by counting government workers as unemployed. And those claims are being echoed by right-wing rags like the National Review and fringe think tanks like the Heritage Foundation [3]. I want to repeat that: conservatives base their claims that unemployment didn't drop below 20 percent during the pre-WWII New Deal not on the official government data [4] showing otherwise, but by counting government workers in programs like the Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps as unemployed.