Last week's new unemployment numbers were bittersweet. At the same time the Bureau of Labor Statistics was declaring that the unemployment rate had declined slightly, to 9.7 percent, the government also was announcing that the economy had lost about 824,000 more jobs during the recession from April 2008 to March 2009 than Americans previously had been told. If this sounds like bureaucratic doublespeak, it is.
The government doesn't really know the exact number of people with or without jobs. The number reported each month is based on surveys, and surveys often can have methodology issues. As it turns out, the surveys estimating the number of people with jobs reported over the past couple of years suffered from some really big problems. That's where government falsely claiming 824,000 more jobs than actually existed comes into play. Unfortunately, those adjustments have so far been made only through March 2009, and there are strong reasons to believe the survey data since then also need to be adjusted downward.
No one will know what the error rate has been with the establishment survey from April to December 2009 until the numbers are revised again in February 2011, three months after the 2010 midterm elections. But a great deal of skepticism seems warranted. The establishment survey assumes that new firms generated almost a million new jobs over those nine months. At the same time, the household survey just happens to show that about a million more jobs were lost than the survey of firms indicates.
The Obama administration has focused continually on the establishment survey in making its claims about changes in the jobs numbers, but this data can be quite misleading. The bottom line is that job losses are likely to be worse than reported, not better. Future jobs claims from the White House should be taken with a grain of salt.
4 comments:
joe - random question. i had a sparrow fly into my sliding glass slider and it looked a little dizzy sitting on the deck. then some friggin black birds attacked it. i beat on the glass and they flew away and the sparrow just sat on the deck. i put on my gloves and put it in a covered box in the garage (with some water and some bird seed). it happened about an hour or 2 ago, and now i can tell he moving around a lot more. when should i let it go? he may be over the shock of the earlier events, but it is a nasty storm out there. thoughts?
You can keep him in the box for a while, it won't hurt him. He's probably back to normal, just got knocked out. It happens all the time. Your call, let him out whenever you see fit. However, don't let him out at night and don't keep him in there for more than a few hours.
Remember people, if the economy gets worse, the Republicans think they can win in November. They have a vested interest in seeing America suffer.
They can't let the truth be known (although anyone who is paying attention already knows) because it would further expose the incompetance and complete failure of the messiah and his czars. What a dangerous circus this administration has turned out to be.
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