Today’s Obamateurism comes from the speech Barack Obama made to the joint session of Congress, in which he demonstrated a curious mathematics on bankruptcies and health care. Pajamas Media columnist AWR Hawkins did the research that the Obama administration apparently found beyond its reach — and the math that no one in the White House bothered to do:

For example, on February 24, 2009, while speaking to a joint session of Congress, Obama said: “The crushing cost of health care … now causes a bankruptcy in America every thirty seconds.” Upon hearing this I grabbed my calculator and ascertained that that means roughly 1,036,800 American families a year are filing bankruptcy because of healthcare expenses.

This is quite amazing when you consider that the New York Times reported there were only 826,732 bankruptcies in America in 2007, with approximately 1.2 million estimated for 2008. Either Obama is right and nearly every bankruptcy in this country is a result of healthcare expenses, or the numbers are purposely being exaggerated in order to create a crisis great enough to justify implementing his healthcare plan.

Needless to say, not every bankruptcy comes from health-care expenses. In fact, the DoJ still argues at the futility of assigning bankruptcies to any one cause, but the biggest factor may not be health costs but divorce.

No doubt that Obama purposefully misrepresented the number and nature of American bankruptcies in order to demagogue for his vision of national health-care reform. The amateur moment was in assuming that everyone was as bad at math as his White House.

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!