Politicians are streching the true.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=412242 source

A libertarian economist says contrary to what the Obama White House is asserting, the U.S. is not experiencing the most severe economic recession in the post-World War II period.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers cut nearly 600,000 jobs last month, pushing the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent. President Obama says those numbers "demand action." He has also stated that the country is in the midst of the worst economic recession in terms of job numbers since the end of World War II.

Richard Ebeling, a senior fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, claims that claim is simply factually incorrect. "The recession of 1949, of 1954, of 1982 show unemployment numbers larger than the ones we're seeing now. We're just basically matching the fourth-worst recession in the post-World War II period of 1975," he contends. "I'm not saying it may not get worse. We don't know the full numbers for February obviously, since we're early in the month and so on, but the fact is that the sky is not falling, the floor is not falling out."

The highest drop-offs in employment, according to Ebeling, are in the construction sector and the automobile industry. But across most other sectors of the economy, he says the employment decline has been 1.5 or 2 percent. Ebeling adds that he in no way wants to minimize the hardships and anxieties workers face when they lose their jobs, but he believes the magnitude of the economic recession is not as severe as many politicians and the media portray it to be.