By Kaitlyn Pujols
If you happened to be scrolling through your social media January 20th you would know that President Obama delivered his state of the union address. In this speech Obama did his fair share of cherry picking facts and exaggerating to shed a better light on his presidency.
The fact that “more than half of manufacturing executives have said they’re actively looking to bring jobs back from China.” is overblown to say the least and a survey showed that most expressed “interest” in it but never deeply considered bringing jobs back from China. This statement is in reference to a study made back in August of 2014 which only included 252 senior manufacturing executives. And while more than half of the executives said they were “interested” in bringing jobs back from China only 16% actively began bringing jobs back from over seas.This is partially due to the fact that work labor in China is substantially cheaper than that of here in America.
Saying the US is “The only advanced country on earth that does not get paid sick leave.” is more than a slight exaggeration when Japan and Canada do not mandate short term sick leave either. Statistically the average person gets short term sickness ( cold, flu etc.) four times a year, having this as paid leave is economically impractical. However Japan and Canada do employ extended leave coverage for people with long term illnesses such as cancer.
The president claimed that the U.S. has gained 11 million private sector jobs in five years. Yes, but that disregards his first 13 months in office where there was net loss of 4,210,000 public sector jobs (primarily in the field of education). Total employment growth during his time in office is actually only about 6.4 million. This is still a massive growth.
Obama also stated that due to the affordable care act more people are insured than ever before. This is based off an assumption and may not be true due to the fact that the statistics for 2014 dealing with who received insurance this year hasn’t been released yet.
On the topic of military drones Obama said his administration has “worked to make sure our use of new technology like drones is properly constrained.” Whether the use of drones has been “properly constrained” is subjective and in actuality, Obama has ordered more drone strikes than ex- president George W. Bush.
