The video's production values are good and the stories are heartbreaking, but if you spend even the slightest bit of energy contemplating the substance beneath the surface, it quickly crumbles.
The video focuses its message of doom and gloom on Iowa, where Mitt Romney will be giving a speech this afternoon. But even though it's four full minutes in length, the video somehow neglects to mention what NBC's Mark Murray pointed out on Twitter: the unemployment rate in Iowa is 5.2 percent, which as Murray says is one of the lowest in the United States. In fact, it's lower than all but four states.
Iowa's unemployment rate has fallen from 6.1 percent when President Obama took office to 5.2 percent by March of 2012. Keep in mind that decline comes even though President Obama took office in the middle of a national economic crisis that drove Iowa's unemployment rate up to 6.3 percent.
By way of comparison, when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, unemployment dropped from 5.6 percent to 4.8 percent in March of 2006 and 4.6 percent at the end of his term. So during President Obama's first 39 months in office, unemployment has fallen by more in Iowa than it did in Mitt Romney's first 39 months in office. Given that the economic winds were at Romney's back during his entire term in office and that President Obama inherited an economic catastrophe, I'll take the Obama record, thank you very much.
But those numbers alone aren't what makes the video absurd. One woman in the video says she's been unemployed so long'more than two years'that her unemployment benefits have expired. No matter how you look at it, that's awful'both that she hasn't found work, and that she no longer has access to unemployment benefits. The thing is, the reason there's no unemployment help for her is precisely because of Republicans like Mitt Romney. And the fact that the topic of his speech in Des Moines today is how to continue cutting spending on programs like unemployment insurance is just icing on the cake.
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