Posted on 02/01/2013 5:52:13 AM PST by Perdogg
... 2.1 million additional jobs, or the number of "statistical" jobs that will be added to the actual number to smooth the jobs trendline, and is the largest of any month in the year. Keep that in mind when considering that the consensus today is for a gain of 165K jobs: a number whose swing will be dwarfed by the actual adjustment added to the actual underlying.
And the usual “secret sauce” was liberally applied to the BLS “revisions” of the Nov. and Dec. numbers to get the 2012 total to 2.2 million jobs created....at least on paper.
No one but the ObamaBots believes this tripe.
You're kidding, right? The BLS’s seasonal adjustments (i.e. special sauce) are not perfect. I prefer to analyze year-on-year not-seasonally-adjusted comparisons. Nonetheless, the CES (current employment statistics) statistics are a reliable reflection of what the BLS observes in its monthly survey of establishments.
When Obama needs a job growth numbers for a SOTU address, the number of jobs are increased driving the unemployment number back up.
The press helps Obama by reporting... well job growth was slow, but unemployment is down. Then when the shell game is played, the press reports, unemployment is up, but look at all the jobs added...
Sorry, but the BLS should really be named the Bureau of Labor BS. The “corrections” they make are fabricated nonsense. For example, despite the fact that the housing market is in the toilet and home construction is at a low ebb, they will add 100’s of thousands of make believe construction jobs in the spring to “seasonally correct” their numbers. And by ignoring millions of people who want a job but after years of looking have just given up, the dept. of BS can report an unemployment rate under 8%. This is NOT something done only for Obama, both political parties are happy with the fake numbers when they are the ones in charge. What they do is simply statistical fraud.
Anyway, as for payroll data, year-over-year not-seasonally adjusted growth rates are a much better basis of comparison. They show that about 2.2 million payroll jobs were created last year. These data are subject to revision (we just received the annual rebenchmarked data today) but they are highly reliable given the enoromous size of the U.S. economy.
Is 2.2 million jobs a good number? It was the largest aggregate since 2006. But, it still leaves us almost four million jobs short of where we were at the end of 2007 and 3.1 milliion fewer than the total when the One took office.
In other words, the numbers don’t lie. The recovery is anemic, irrespective of $6 trillion in stimulative government deficits and nearly $3 trillion of Fed high powered money creation. Given these circumstances you better be creating 2.2 million jobs a year or something is radically wrong.
Also, it is important to note that the y-o-y comparison in January was the weakest since December 2011 (up 2.0mm or 1.6%). That's not a positive trend. We don’t need to claim that the numbers are cooked to conclude that they are bad. By suggesting that the data are manipulated you are placing yourself among the tinfoil hat brigade and no one will take you seriously.
Thank you for an intelligent reply, although tossing out your tinfoil hat barb at the end wasn’t necessary to make your point. Sorry, but I do think that the numbers are probably cooked for political reasons - by both parties, not just the dems. It’s all a matter of managing expectations. Pretty hard to get everyone thinking that the economy is turning around if the official numbers don’t support that idea. Why put out numbers that highlight weakness? Tossing in imaginary jobs that someone assumes must be there based on historical studies means that they believe that the economy is static when obviously it is not. My tinfoil theories also apply to the calculation of inflation. Since inflation is used to determine quite a few government expenses, there is an obvious motivation to skew the numbers downward. After elimination of things that show actual inflation, the dark art of hedonic pricing takes care of the final calculation. Lo and behold, inflation is contained and the actions of the fed can be justified. I don’t deny that printing trillions for the banking cartel has done something in the actual economy and even more for stock market asset inflation (cheered in the media as wealth creation). However, I’m very skeptical of all government issued numbers and view them as simple propaganda.
Human nature being what it is, I imagine there is always the chance that some economists at the BLS may succumb to the temptation to infuse bias intu their statistical models and sampling techniques. But it is all but impossible for that organization to do so on a wholesale, concerted basis.
The reality of the situation is that the staff are dedicated to the voluminous task of producing reliable data for the benefit of economic actors, investors, students and researchers like me. They are egg-headed academics for the most part with a high degree of professional integrity.
But that doesn’t mean we should be unwary consumers of their product. I am skeptical when the agency introduces new methodologies or redefines statistical categories or metrics. I have seen instances when data that cannot be collected is imputed based on statistical analyses that are not well explained, if not evidently biased.
Yes, they could do a better job of sharing raw data so independent researchers may validate their work. But no, there is no evidence of systematic bias.
I think many on the Right are angered by the way in which the media report economic data. The reportage is biased in a way the benefits the Left and the statists. But this isn’t the data’s fault and we don’t do ourselves any favors by blaming the data or those who toil thanklessly to collect and report it.
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