The Obama administration was giddy with glee with the Commerce Department’s reported drop in the unemployment rate from 10% to 9.3%. But those of us who actually read the Commerce report are not so excited. Why? Because! And I quote from the report, “Those gains resulted from seasonal adjustments to the data. Without those adjustments, the data show fewer people had jobs last month.”

Get it. More people were out of work, but by adjusting upward the total number of people in the labor force you can arithmetically compute a decrease in the unemployment rate. Is it any wonder that the concept of transparency in government is obscured?

It reminds me of the old Boolean algebra problem -- All the statements I make are true except this one. The economy is so fragile and the market is so frail that we leverage the smallest piece of good news into a conviction that things are getting better. But not so true for the additional people that were out of work this month. I voted for Obama against the advice of many. I believed he would provide hope to a nation in need of it.

However, he flails around causing many of us to lose the last aspects of hope and motivating our leaders to place their heads in the sand hoping for a solution embedded in silicon. Simple solutions are overlooked. For example health care. I am 67. I and many of my friends are on Medicare. It has been a successful government run health care system for many years. It works. I can attest to that. Government programs are not all bad. Our congress and representatives have a pretty good government run health care program too.

What is the point? The facts do not support an automatic party line refusal to consider a program like Medicare as an option for all of us. Lower the age to enroll in Medicare to 21. Charge for it. And I bet that it would be cheaper than purchasing health care through your state certified insurance company. I can support this health care option and still be in favor of lower capital gains. Although these concepts are often associated with different party platforms, the concepts are not mutually exclusive.