Despite that, the head of the Commission on Presidential Debates thinks that this is the kind of issue that moderators shouldn't try to fact-check the candidates on. "If you and I have different sources of information," she asked CNN's Brian Stelter, "does your source about the unemployment rate agree with my source?" The, I guess, fact that it might not is why she doesn't think it's "a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopaedia Britannica."

AD

The problem is, of course, that there aren't different sources of information about the unemployment rate any more than there are different sources of information about what two plus two equals. There's the BLS, and then there are conspiracy theorists. That's it. That doesn't mean that the unemployment rate tells us everything we need to know about the state of the labor market. It doesn't. It needs context. And for that, we can turn to other numbers from the BLS. We can see, for example, that today's 4.9 percent unemployment rate isn't quite as good as 1997's 4.9 percent unemployment rate, because so many 25-to-54-year-olds who should be in the prime of their working years are not, in fact, working or even looking for a job. Or that there are another couple million people who want full-time work but can only find part-time jobs.

AD

But that's a lot different from saying, as Trump does, that the unemployment rate is "really" 23 percent or 42 percent or another made-up number. Even the broadest possible definition of under- and unemployment — people who can't find work, people who have given up looking for work, people who "should" be working but for whatever reason aren't, and people who can only find part-time work — wouldn't even be half as much as what Trump is saying.

The fact — there's that word again — is that Donald Trump has a penchant for saying things that are false. He's lied about opposing the Iraq War from the beginning, suggested that vaccines cause autism, said that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, claimed that "thousands and thousands" of Muslims in New Jersey were cheering on 9/11, insinuated that Ted Cruz's father had something to do with the JFK assassination, and, of course, questioned whether President Obama was really born in the United States — continuing to do so even after Obama released his birth certificate. It isn't partisan to point out that none of these are true. Nor is it to say that the unemployment rate isn't worse than it was during the Great Depression.