Friday, June 04, 2010

Obama's deft handling of the economy continues apace: after adjustments, real jobs shrunk by 226,000 last month

The headline on CNN's front page reads: "Jobs in May jump."

Other legacy media outlets are plugging an "improved" unemployment rate, celebrating the the drop to 9.7%!

CNBC is touting the jump in jobs as the largest increase since March 2000 (gee, when was the last U.S. Census?).

The hundreds of administration-approved press releases can't hide the true scale of the unfolding economic disaster. More Americans are unemployed than ever, they are unemployed longer, and if you don't count temporary Census jobs and the BLS' mathematical skulduggery, the gravity of the situation becomes obvious.

Consider the makeup of the official "431,000 jobs added" number (and never mind the fact that some were touting an expectation of 700,000 new jobs):

• 411,000 were census jobs
• 31,000 were temporary help services (BP clean-up hires?)
• 215,000 jobs were "created" using the BLS "birth-death" mathematical model

If you remove the 657,000 temporary and formula jobs from the reported 431,000 jobs added, you're left with a stunning stat:

The economy actually lost 226,000 jobs last month.

And 322,000 folks stopped looking for jobs, which seems to have helped drop the unemployment number as well.

Now here's a question for the advocates of big government: why do we need a Bureau of Labor Statistics when the IRS already houses the vast majority of this information? Why can't we have a real jobs number based upon the IRS' real data?

That's a rhetorical question. Accuracy was never President Axelrod's goal here.


3 comments:

swede said...

Pfffft. You didn't say "real jobs". We have saved, created or imagined "500 million jobs" (Pelosi's figure). And since there are only 300 million people in the country, that's 1.6 jobs for every man, woman and child.

Do not believe what you see, only what we tell you.

Whitehall said...

You don't even need the IRS. One can just check the Social Security payments incoming.

Of course, a small percentage of the population maxes our before the end of the year so the last few months will need some guesstimate corrections.

MarkJ said...

Ummm, well, in the Obama Administration's alternate universe, located on Planet Omicron Seti 5, we have indeed saved or created bazillions of new jobs. So, technically, Obama and his homies are telling the truth.

See how simple all this is?