The "next eight nations combined" add up to $532 billion annual military expenditures. Compare that to the U.S.'s annual total of $581 billion, and Pres. Obama is accurate. (Sen. Rand Paul said in 2015 the same statement about "the next ten countries combined," and we rated his statement "loosely accurate", but Obama could have gone up to "the next nine nations combined" adding in South Korea's $34B). Obama's point was the same as Paul's: the U.S. has by far the strongest military on earth, and we need not increase military spending to maintain our military dominance.
That chart indicates that unemployment reached a peak of 10.0% in Oct. 2009, eight months after Obama took office. And the current unemployment rate as of Dec. 2015 is 5.0%, exactly half of the peak unemployment rate. So, yes, the president was correct. But voters might interpret his meaning as "an unemployment rate cut in half from when I took office", which is not correct; to be correct, you must use the interpretation "an unemployment rate cut in half from the peak of the recession."
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The above quotations are from Presidential Primary Fact Checking by OnTheIssues.org.
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