OnTheIssues Fact Checking: on Jobs

Barack Obama: We've cut unemployment in half during my term

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."

Ron Paul: FactCheck: Feds paid for 8M WWII vets to attend college

After WWII, the GI Bill let vets attend college on federal funds. According to the GI Bill website run by the Veterans Administration, "Thanks to the GI Bill, millions who would have flooded the job market instead opted for education. By the time the GI Bill ended in 1956, 7.8 million of 16 million WWII veterans had participated in an education or training program." That directly contradicts Rep. Paul's implication: while the overall budget was cut after WWII, federal spending on the GI Bill increased (there were numerous other GI programs too, such as 2.4 million home loan guarantees to veterans). It is simply untrue that "everybody went back to work": 49% of all WWII vets went to college on a federal subsidy, which also means it's simply untrue that we "didn't need any special programs."