It's not mathematics, it's ideology

"There are three types of liars: Liars, damn liars, and statisticians."

Mark Twain

The Bureau of Labor Statistics gave a broad boost to President Barack Obama's quest for a second term a week or so ago when it announced a 0.2 percent drop in the nation's unemployment rate. That rate is now the lowest since February 2009, and the president was quick to take credit for it.

"The numbers came down because more people found work," he said. "These numbers will go up and down in coming months ... but the economy is growing stronger, the recovery is speeding up." He urged Congress to get on board. "They've got to renew the payroll tax cut they've extended and do it without drama, without delay, without linking it to some ideological side issue. Now is not the time for self-inflicted wounds for our economy. Don't muck it up -- keep it moving in the right direction."

What President Obama and the other usual suspects did not say was that the same Bureau of Labor Statistics said that the American workforce fell by 1.2 million workers in January -- the largest one month drop ever. It shouldn't take a genius to make the connection between this and the much celebrated (and minuscule) drop in the official unemployment rate, a rate statisticians calculated by applying recently tweaked "seasonal adjustment" factors.

Theoretically, if you change the formula used to compute the unemployment rate, you can make it whatever you want it to be. And there are some who suspect that is exactly what is happening. As the president himself is wont to say, it's not ideology, it's mathematics.

The truth, however, is that there are millions fewer Americans working today than when Obama took office. These millions did not disappear from the face of the earth. They gave up hope of finding a job. They dropped out of the workforce. Ninety-nine weeks of unemployment benefits, rent subsidies, food stamps, tax credits, etc. -- these are being paid for with money borrowed from abroad or taken from the earnings of past, present and future generations of working Americans.

A prolonged decline in the size of the workforce, relative to population, is not indicative of a healthy state of affairs. Three years plus into the current administration, the U.S. economy is not growing fast enough to lower the real rate of unemployment. Trillion-dollar budget deficits, an exploding national debt, economic malaise (reminiscent of Jimmy Carter) -- these are inherent in an expansive welfare state. It is an old and much repeated story in the annals of economic history. Rome's bread and circuses are today's food stamps and Super Bowls in America.

More and more Americans are subsisting on benefits extended by the government. More and more Americans are nevertheless in financial distress. More and more Americans have dropped below the poverty line. Hence, the demand for ever more assistance programs, the pleading for extension of the payroll tax cut.

How long ago was it that the actuarial disaster looming over Social Security and Medicare dominated the news? And yet now, perhaps because this is an election year, extension of the payroll tax cut is one of President Obama's highest priorities and something Republicans in Congress dare not oppose. For many years the Social Security deduction from take-home pay was not considered a tax.

It was a "contribution," though a mandated one, to a future dignified retirement. Medicare's share of the working man's paycheck was a premium paid for guaranteed health insurance for the elderly.

How did these contributions and premium payments become a tax? How did the federal government borrow hundreds of billions from the Social Security and Medicare trust funds? What is the logic behind hastening rather than forestalling the day when both of these huge entitlement programs are bankrupt? Where is the worry, the near panic such a prospect raised just a few years ago?

Candidate Barack Obama famously said he thought "spreading the wealth around" was a good thing for America. President Barack Obama pursues such a policy assiduously to this day, though only as it concerns wealth accumulated by "millionaires and billionaires."

But considering the fruits of his labors to transform what was, until a few short years ago, the most vibrant and productive economy the world had ever seen, who has really "mucked" things up?

Who is the mucker, and who the muckee?

R.L. Schreadley is a former Post and Courier executive editor.