The dictionary tells us that "a few" is "a small number of persons or things." Though there is some ambiguity in the guidance I have reviewed, it's fair to say that "Generally a few is more than 2."
Not at the Associated Press, where "a few" can apparently be two, at least when it comes to "fact-checking" President Obama's grandiose claims in his Thursday speech at Northwestern University. Thanks to Obama's primary contention that "it is indisputable that our economy is stronger today than when I took office," any economy-related statistic was fair game for the AP's Christopher Rugaber. But the AP reporter chose only to address two nitty-gritty items, while avoiding any attempt to evaluate Obama's core assertion.
Rugaber's relative small-ball examples involved job openings and healthcare cost increases. He at least was skeptical about how Obama framed both items (bolds are mine):
FACT CHECK: Obama on jobs, health care
OBAMA: "Right now, there are more job openings than at any time since 2001."
THE FACTS: True as far as it goes, but a job opening is not the same as a job filled, and companies are taking longer to fill them than before the recession. Although the number of available jobs has recovered from the recession, total hiring hasn't.
Economists cite several likely reasons for this gap.
With the unemployment rate still somewhat elevated, companies may be pickier about the people they hire than they were in flusher times. They also may not be willing to offer high enough pay to attract the workers they want. Moreover, Michael Hanson, an economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says technology has made it so easy and cheap to post jobs that companies may do so even when they're not ready to hire. They may just want to see their options. "It's one big fishing expedition," Hanson says.
In other words, companies apparently believe that it's important to at least look their hiring, both to reassure the public that all is well (even when it might not be) and to perhaps get the occasional superstar who might stumble into their path. As an metric of overall national economic health, the job openings stat may thus have become virtually meaningless.
Continuing:
OBAMA: Today, we've seen a dramatic slowdown in the rising cost of health care. ... Meanwhile, partly because health care prices have been growing at the slowest rate in nearly half a century, the growth in what health care costs the government is down, too."
THE FACTS: Here today, gone tomorrow?
Health care inflation has indeed been tame in recent years, but nonpartisan experts from Obama's own Health and Human Services Department predict that's changing, starting this year. Spending will grow by an average of 6 percent a year from 2015 to 2023, a significant acceleration after five years of annual growth below 4 percent, they said in a report last month from the Office of the Actuary.
Obama's health care law, which he credited with keeping costs down, on balance is expected to contribute to the rising costs in those years ...
... both the defenders of the law and its critics overlook (that) ... it's not the health care overhaul primarily powering rises or falls in medical spending. It's the economy.
In other words, if the economy ever gets legitimately better, demand for healthcare services in an era of deliberately restricted supply — which is due to "health care overhaul," despite what Rugaber claimed — will cause costs to skyrocket.
Rugaber, who actually needed help from two other AP reporters to compile his exhaustive list of two items, couldn't be bothered to work up a list of measures which show that the ecomony is not better off than it was in January 2009. The indispensable Gateway Pundit, who unlike Rugaber doesn't focus exclusively on the economy, came up with a dozen items definitively disproving the supposedly "indisputable" contention when Obama recently made it at another venue.
An "Editor's Note" at the end of Rugaber's piece indicates that it was supposed to be an example of "An occasional look at political claims that take shortcuts with the facts or don't tell the full story." Apparently very occasional; despite the fertile ground for fact-checking in Obama's speech, a search on "fact check" (not in quotes) at the AP's national site at 11 PM ET on Tuesday had no evidence of any additional follow-up effort relating to Obama's speech.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
