NYC Letter: Awesome Arithmetic

Day 16 of CHOPE

Every month we do not have an economic recovery package 500 million Americans lose their jobs.

Nancy Pelosi (D-CA, 8th),
Speaker of the House, crack demographer,
and stimulus architect, revealing surprising new numbers
February 3, 2009 (YouTube)*

Holy smoke! This is terrible! [We gnash our teeth.] How terrible? Consider that the American labor force is 155.2 million (this includes unemployed). Without a magic "economic recovery package", every working American, the unemployed, the entire American labor force, will lose their jobs -- jobs some don't even have -- more than 3X each and every month.

[Pause.] On the bright side such unreal job losses presuppose a lot of unreal jobs to be lost. If Ms. Pelosi has her arithmetic correct, that makes the annual employment rate something like 322%! Maybe 3,864%! We're just not sure how to wrap our minds around the rolling month-to-month.

[Pause.] Bummer, everyone in the labor force gets fired or laid off 36X a year. If relocation is involved, that can be as many as 36 change-of-address forms to fill out and file.

[Pause.] Then again if every American man, woman, and child were to have a job -- a work force of 303,824,640 -- then they would only lose their jobs 1.65X a month every month without a magic "economic recovery package". That's half the job losses!

Once the stimulus package is in place, soon every American will have the two or three or four jobs necessary to unhock America.

[Pause.] We remember critics of Sarah Palin berating her experience and ridiculing her grasp of the facts. Here is Ms. Pelosi, speaker of the House, who apparently hasn't a clue to the population of the United States or the size of the job market or the labor force.

Again Ms. Pelosi demonstrates why Democrats have elected her to the pinnacle of House leadership, putting her second in line for the presidency after Joe "Hi-Q" Biden.

[Frisson.]

------------------------------------
* Special note, not one journalist at the presser challenged this fantastic claim. Ms. Pelosi has made this claim at least once before, on Fox News Sunday. Host Chris Wallace corrected her.