As I have said many times, I am no economic expert. Yet, this announcement of a drop in unemployment numbers from 8.1% to 7.8% smells fishy to me. On Sunday, the jobs number was released at 114,000. That by-line read that such an increase would not be sufficient for a drop in the unemployment percentage. That's because you need something like a 150,000 increase just to keep up with the numbers of people entering the workforce every month.
So boom! Today the number 7.8% is announced by Hilda Solis' Dept. of Labor. Some of the experts out there are already smelling a rat.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/10/05/jobless-rate-falls-to-78-percent-in-september/
Ah yes. The old "look what we overlooked in past months" line. Of course, for some reason, they don't count those who have given up looking for a job-as if they had died. Add those and the number goes up dramatically.
Its impossible to organize a conspiracy encompassing that many nonpartisan civil servants interviewing 60,000 people. Instead of showing paranoia in public, you'd do better to point out that its a statistically insignificant improvement.
ReplyDeleteAnd the REAL point is, people don't vote based on reading the latest statistics, but on how they themselves feel on election day.
If unemployment dropped to four percent, would that motivate you to vote for Obama?
Didn't think so.
Siarlys,
ReplyDeletePoint well taken, but Hilda Solis was a union activist in Cal before she joined Obama's cabinet. We have already seen how the DOJ has been politicized-why not Labor?
Now you're getting really vague Gary... politicization has happened... whatever exactly that is... so "why not" the possibility that it may have happened... leaving admittedly in the dust the notion that anyone could have cooked the books on this statistic...
ReplyDeleteAs for Hilda Solis being a union activist, in my seldom humble opinion, that's a prerequisite for being a good secretary of LABOR. Now if she was nominated for Secretary of Commerce, I'd have a few questions...
I'm a labor kind of guy you know... posting photos of unions at labor day parades, former shop steward, all for the Employee Free Choice Act...
I share Gary’s unease. Some time back, I predicted here and elsewhere that the unemployment rate would drop as the election approached. Amazingly or otherwise, that very convenient “fact” has occurred. I am a little (actually a lot) surprised that gas prices have not yet also dropped fairly precipitously, but there is still some time for that to happen.
ReplyDeleteI must agree with Holtz-Eakin that if true, the alleged number of 873,000 new jobs is “implausible” and, if it happens to be somehow true, an anomaly. I say this because at least according to this article, while the number of new jobs reported from July-September is a little over double the number from the previous three months, April-June, the average monthly job gains for 2012 to date are smaller than for all of 2011. Comparatively speaking, the 873,000 number would be a huge jump and probably did not actually happen, which would imply that the “figgers were jiggered“.
It is not that nonpartisan career civil servants engage in a conspiracy to inflate the numbers. It is what the much higher-ranking political appointees do with, or give directives as to what to do with, the data after it is collected. Been there, done that.
Obama and his crew are obviously smart enough to know that they cannot report a drastic drop in the unemployment rate in too short a period of time. That is why the rate has been reported to be gradually dropping from 10-whatever per cent it was down to 8.1 percent and then to 7.8 percent currently. It is quite predictable, and I will so predict, and wager if anyone is interested, that the October numbers, just prior to the election, will show a even further drop to something not too much above 7 per cent, like 7.4 or whatever.
As I have done before, for anyone who thinks this bunch (they are not alone) will not “cook the books” for political gain, I have some one-owner used cars, some oceanfront land in Arizona, and several books of wolf tickets I would like to get rid of.