Ron Paul: Unemployment 'probably closer to 20 percent'

Ron Paul dismissed Friday's jobs report while campaigning in Kansas, saying he believed American unemployment was "probably closer to 20 percent."

“You know what the unemployment rate really is? It’s probably closer to 20 percent,” Paul said, according to The Washington Post. “Today they were talking about the good news reports, but they’re very, very token.”

In a statement released by the campaign Friday, Paul said that the jobs figures — which showed that the economy added more than 225,000 jobs but that unemployment remained at 8.3 percent — were evidence that the president's stimulus plan had failed.

“In 2009, President Obama's economic advisers said his big-spending ‘stimulus’ bill would reduce unemployment to less than 8 percent. In 2011, President Obama and congressional leaders promised the American people they would reduce the deficit. Today’s announcements that the official unemployment rate — which understates that true amount of unemployment — increased in February while the federal deficit reached historic levels provides further proof of the failure of the Keynesian spend-borrow-tax-and-inflate policies embraced by the Beltway leadership of both parties," Paul said.

In Kansas, Paul argued that the government had manipulated the figures to make it appear as if the economy were recovering.

"If you want to really know why the American people feel badly about the economy, it’s that the unemployment rate is escalating. It’s very high,” he said. “But if you take ... the number of people employed, 132 million people, it’s the same number that was employed in the year 2000. There have been no new jobs produced.”

President Obama heralded the report as evidence of "another good month" during a speech Friday in Richmond.

“Manufacturing is adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s,” Obama said. “We just had another good month last month in terms of adding manufacturing jobs, and this facility is part of the evidence of what’s going on.”

Paul is hoping to score an upset win — what would be the first of the campaign — in Saturday's Kansas caucuses.

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