Posted on 08/05/2011 7:57:02 AM PDT by george76
Let’s start with the reality that fewer people actually were working in July than in June.
According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdown, there were 139,296,000 people working in July, compared to 139,334,000 the month before. That’s actually a drop of 2.7 percent.
But the job creation number was positive and the unemployment rate went down, right? So how does that work?
It’s a product of something the government calls “discouraged workers,” or those who were unemployed but not out looking for work during the reporting period.
This is where the numbers showed a really big spike—up from 982,000 to 1.119 million, a difference of 137,000 or a 14 percent increase. These folks are generally not included in the government’s various job measures.
So the drop in the unemployment rate is fairly illusory—stick all those people back in the workforce and you wipe out the job creation and the drop in unemployment.
For once, some of the government’s other tools of economic voodoo didn’t help the count.
The vaunted birth-death model, a byzantine approximation of business creation and failure, actually subtracted 18,000 from the total job creation after a five-month run where it added a total of 741,000 positions to the count.
...
The average duration of unemployment rose for the third straight month and is now at a record 40.4 weeks—about 10 months and now double where it was when President Obama took office in January 2009. The total number unemployed for more than half a year now stands at 6.18 million, 130 percent higher than when the president’s term began.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
And don’t these always get revised later?
The media love to actively engage in positive social programming when a Dem is in office. Unfortunately that hasn’t helped them out too much. People are growing slightly more savy to the various tactics in which the media employs.
the obama administration’s unemployment figures will mysteriously drop to 4% by election time.
Seems counter intuitive, less people employed in July then in June and yet unemployment figure goes down from 9.2 to 9.1. Certainly makes one wonder just how the gov determines the unemployment rate. It is a pretty good trick to have a lower unemployment rate with fewer workers working.
Total Employment graph:
http://conceptualmath.org/philo/phpix/j_trends.gif
Annual growth in Total Employment graph:
http://conceptualmath.org/philo/phpix/j_trends_g.gif
there were 139,296,000 people working in July, compared to 139,334,000 the month before. That’s actually a drop of 2.7 percent.
Only off by a factor of 100. can I trust the rest of the article, even though I’m inclined to agree with the message?
I see the error has already been corrected:
“According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics breakdown, there were 139,296,000 people working in July, compared to 139,334,000 the month before, or a drop of 38,000.”
Wow. That's some pretty bad math. (139296-139334)/139296 = -0.00027 = -0.027%.
interesting charts!
...but i notice the extremely sharp spike upwards in “Annual Growth”,
starting almost the second Obama took office.
frankly, i don’t believe that.
i think they are lying and doctoring the numbers even more than i previously did.
(similar to how NASA etc actually LOWERED temperatures on 100 year old charts, to falsely increase the “warming trend”.)
even without the math error, total employment is lower,
while certainly population increased.
yet as jpsb said, the unemployment figure is reported as improving from 9.2 to 9.1 ?
the obama administration’s unemployment figures will mysteriously drop to 4% by election time.
Totally agree with you on that. And it will be because they will pick and choose who gets counted in that number and who doesn’t - kinda like their pick-and-choose inflation calculation.
And the chart I cited is somewhat dated. I tried to get the current BLS chart for Total Non-Farm Employment and got a message that it was currently not available. Would they hide embarrassing data?
How long does it take to get the revised down number?
This isn’t news to those who know reality. But, what is surprising is this story is at the CNBC site.
Jobs Ping
Interesting numbers (yeah, we know they’ll eventually be revised down, but we’ll work with what we have). There are 139,296,000 workers in a population of 307,745,530 people. That means that 45.2% of the population us supporting, in one way or another, 54.8% of the population. That would be true, of course if all of the 45.2% actually pay taxes. Sadly, that’s not the case, from numbes I’ve seen recently, something like half of workers actually pay income tax, if we’re lucky. So, we essentially have less than 23% of us, which translates to about 71 million folks, carrying the entire load for 237 million people. And we wonder why we’re so heavily in debt.
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