New employment data
Here are the new employment stats released by the Labor Department today:
The problem with levelling that charge is that it would require a fairly broad-based conspiracy among professional government employees who are likely to pride themselves on their accuracy -- but, more and more, I suspect these positions have been packed with Bush's puppets, and those who aren't slavishly loyal to Bush have probably been thoroughly intimidated. After all, look what happened even to Bush loyalists in eight U.S. Attorney positions.
There's something seriously wrong with this combination of results. The unemployment rate falls even though people are losing their jobs right and left and the new jobs created are fewer by far than the number of new entrants to the workforce. This mismatch in results has been going on more or less continuously throughout the Bush administration. Maybe you can attribute it to growing numbers of totally discouraged people dropping out of the workforce permanently, but I doubt it. There are just too many of them by now (as I work it out, there are now over 6 million people who should be in the workforce but aren't). Frankly, I think someone is tinkering with the data.WASHINGTON - The nation's unemployment rate dipped to 4.5 percent in February even as big losses of construction and factory jobs restrained overall payroll growth. Wages grew briskly.
...Employers, meanwhile, added 97,000 new jobs to their payrolls in February, the fewest in two years, as bad winter weather forced construction companies to slash 62,000 jobs, the most since 1991. Factories, feeling the strain of the troubled housing and auto industries, also continued to cut jobs. They eliminated 14,000 positions last month.
The problem with levelling that charge is that it would require a fairly broad-based conspiracy among professional government employees who are likely to pride themselves on their accuracy -- but, more and more, I suspect these positions have been packed with Bush's puppets, and those who aren't slavishly loyal to Bush have probably been thoroughly intimidated. After all, look what happened even to Bush loyalists in eight U.S. Attorney positions.
posted by walldon | 9:45 AM
2 Comments:
I have shared the same concern for some time -- as well as the same concern with how it can get teased out if there is collusion. It would be nice if there were a competent journalist who recognizes the political importance of the official unemployment rate, and would actually have the intelligence to say, "These numbers do not make sense" -- and use that simple observation to start asking questions that gets into the professional bowels of these organizations. When Bill Clinton was President, the working age population of people who would like a job (best determined by the employment-to-population ratio when unemployment is low) grew by about 14 million -- yet 18 million new jobs were generated. That means almost 4 million people came out of hibernation back into the workforce when Clinton was President. Under Bush, that population has grown by 12 million but only 8 million jobs have been generated. In other words, the 4 million dropped back out of the workforce.
Absolutely right. The number of discourage workers would have to nearly double the number of new jobs added to get close to this result, and, that, not surprisingly hasn't happened since DOL launched the CES and the LAUS data systems. Fudging the data by Bush lackies in the Press is bad enough, but in the halls of data officialdom it is a slippery slope to the Orweliian world toward which Bush is moving us.
Post a Comment
<< Home