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The panel on CBS' "Face the Nation" talked about a Republican alternative to Obamacare.
President Barack Obama’s upcoming State of the Union address gave Republicans and Democrats on Sunday an opportunity to make their case about the economic successes and failings over the last five years.
On Fox News Sunday, Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said that the United States has added 8 million jobs since March 2010. On Face the Nation, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, offered a seemingly opposite assertion about the jobs picture.
"Why are jobs and economic growth so dismal?" he asked host Bob Schieffer. "We’ve got the lowest labor force participation in over three decades, since 1978. And if President Obama wants to give and honest, candid State of the Union address this week, he’ll address the fact that his economic policies are not working."
It’s difficult to measure how much Obama's policies are causing the economy to stall -- or in the case of Pfeiffer, succeed -- but Cruz's specific claim about labor force participation rates Mostly True, PolitiFact found.
The labor force participation rate refers to the percentage of Americans who are considered to be in the labor force as a part of the overall population. To be counted in the labor force, someone must be working or actively looking for work. In December (and also October), the labor force participation rate was 62.8 percent. In January and March of 1978, it was also 62.8 percent.
How much the blame falls on Obama is the subject of an ongoing debate.
There is understandable concern about the country’s long-term unemployed and discouraged workers. The economic recovery from the 2007-09 recession has been slow, which may have propelled people to go back to school, stay at home with their kids or give up on a search altogether when they could not find jobs in their field.
Still, many economists attribute at least a portion of the drop to an unsurprising reason: the retirement of baby boomers, which does not exactly qualify as an American horror story.
"The trick is to determine how much of the drop represents the impact of a lagging economy, which is worrisome, and how much is due to non-worrisome factors, such as the aging of the adult population," Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution, told PolitiFact recently.
On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also discussed Obama’s Tuesday night speech and specifically Obama’s repeated calls to wage the federal minimum wage above the current rate of $7.25 an hour.
McConnell suggested that many of the people who make the minimum wage are young and just starting their working careers.
"The minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for young people," he said.
That claim rates Mostly True, according to PolitiFact.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that half of all workers making a minimum wage are 16 to 24, and another 20 percent are in their late 20s or early 30s. That’s a large chunk of the minimum wage workforce, though about 30 percent of people making the minimum wage are 35 and older.
McConnell, however, could have selected a better word to describe these jobs other than "entry-level." For most young people, these are part-time jobs in the food or retail businesses or similar industries with little hope for career advancement.
Staff writers Steve Contorno and Katie Sanders contributed to this report. Aaron Sharockman is the editor of PunditFact.com.
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