Earlier today I heard yet another ridiculous piece of fear-mongering on FOX News’ 2-hour Saturday morning business block. I forget which of the half hour shows it was on, but one of the special guests made a comment that America is losing more than 20,000 jobs each day. Twenty-thousand jobs each day.
Really?
Let’s think about that in real figures for a minute. If America was losing 20,000 jobs each day, that would be 140,000 jobs lost each week. There have absolutely been horrible announcements about new sets of layoffs each week. But if this country was losing 20,000 jobs each day, that would mean that we’re losing 7.3 million jobs each year. Ahem…losing seven million, three hundred thousand jobs each year.
This is clearly not the case. Think about it in terms of real jobs: Wal-Mart employs about 2.1 million people; McDonald’s employs some 400 thousand; Home Depot employs about 330 thousand; Bank of America has around 172 thousand employees; and Macy’s has about 182 thousand people currently employed. Combined, you’re still looking at approximately 3,180,000 workers – less than half of what the woman on the show this morning was fear mongering about.
If you believe what this fear monger believes with respect to America losing jobs, then you might believe that more than double of the equivalent amount of total jobs provided by Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Home Depot, Bank of America, and Macy’s will be gone in a twelve month time period.
The economy is in a rough period right now and it might last for a few more weeks, months, or even years. But when people go around trying to sell fear like this it does nothing to help get the nation’s psyche back where it needs to be.
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and one of the commentators made the suggestion that while race was a factor in the Presidential election, it was not a limiting factor. In other words, while the old time news media and the old time race-baiters tried to use race in a fear-mongering context, there were citizens who voted for Senator Barack Obama simply because he is a black man! In a country where a few decades ago black children were sent to separate schools from white children and in a country where certain “civil rights leaders” are constantly trying to divide and conquer, this is a remarkable tribute to the nobility of today’s electorate!