For the last week President Obama and his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness- a council that's supposed to be jump starting hiring- have been going around the country claiming that there are 2 million manufacturing jobs available right now that are going unfilled because the U.S. doesn't have the skilled workforce to fill those jobs.

It gets worse.

And they are making the pitch to spend $2 billion to try to remedy this problem.

It gets worse still.

"There are more than two million open jobs in the U.S.," writes Obama's Jobs chiefs Jeff Immelt (GE) and Ken Chenault (American Express) in the Wall Street Journal, "in part because employers can't find workers with the advanced manufacturing skills they need."