Darth Vador Buses

The President just returned from a three state bus tour that looks a lot like an election campaign tour because he wanted to “connect with the people”. One of the features of this tour was the unveiling of a special built bus that is equipped with state of the art communications and security systems. In reality, there are two identical busses that were bought and paid for by the taxpaying public both, for some reason painted a glossy black. According to news reports each bus also cost in the neighborhood of 1.1 million dollars, and were built, not in the U.S., but in Canada.

Although each bus was tricked out by the Hemphill Brothers Coach Co, of Tennessee the basic buses were built by the Prevost Co. of Quebec and are listed as products of Canada in the legal documents. While I don’t deny that the Hemphill Brothers build a fine vehicle I can’t help wondering why importing the President’s ride from Canada can in any way create the jobs the President is talking about and do anything about reducing unemployment at home rather than over the border.

I wonder what the unions, whose support the President depends on think of this?

Statistics for Politicians

One of the many things government is good at is collecting demographic information and statistical data. And I’ve found that if you dig through the mountains of data that is available on line you can learn some interesting things. For instance, while spending a hot afternoon digging through some Bureau of Labor Statistics data I ran across a table titled Employment / Population Ratio, and the June 2011 figure was 58.5%.

In effect there were slightly less than 6 adults out of 10 who worked at a job during the month of June. That is the lowest employment percentage seen since 1981, when we were coming out of the Carter presidency.

Yet we are told that the unemployment rate is 9%.