Unemployment Numbers are Bogus
 

http://reason.com/blog/2012/10/11/un...rices-rise-hou


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-1...low-lowest-exp

Basically, one large state didn't turn in their figures yet. Why weren't we told this????

So BLS put out there figures knowing the data from one state was missing? Wonder why they didn't wait on them, or publicize the fact that it was incomplete data, instead of putting out as accurate what would have to be inaccurate data?

So, let's here from the truth squadders who were calling us all nuts for saying it was easy for government agencies to fudge the numbers when they needed to.

:popcorn:

Apparently, the incomplete nature of the numbers was kept from the American people. This is an administration in meltdown.

I can only think of two "large" states that could have that kind of impact, CA and TX.

What's NOT bogus with this administration?

What? Number of people employed increased by 114,000 and number unemployed decreased by 456,000.

I don't see anything wrong with these numbers. What's this thread all about anyway? :shocked:

Don't mind them... its already established that here

Any bad news= must be gospel.
Any good news = must be tainted.

Folks here actually are hoping for bad news and rooting against economic recovery. Damnedest thing I've ever seen. :dunno:

If you don't see the problem, then you are the problem.

Sorry.

You don't think it's slightly odd that the BLS dropped a report, without a big disclaimer that would keep the otherwise unbiased and scrupulously detail-oriented MSM from drawing the wrong conclusion, that did not include the data from "one large state" a mere month before a major election?

It's de rigeur for the BLS to release a report with incomplete data? That's not "tainted" in your mind?

Because I don't think it's normal and I can only think of one reason why the BLS would release such a thing. If you can think of another, by all means share with the group.

Why are you accepting these two questionable links as gospel?

Well, OK:

http://nation.foxnews.com/jobs/2012/...ate?intcmp=fly

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/...reaming_stream

Is it only a "questionable link" when it doesn't foot with the "happy days are here again" narrative the Administration is trying to fool people into believing?

I am sure this is not shocking to any one. The truth of the matter is if you keep your eye open they have been doing for a while now. Look at the job #'s at the end of every month and then look at them again a week after. You will find that the # become higher every time.

Just out of curiosity:

1) What would you say if the report that is due to be released just days before the election shows that the unemployment rate has gone up to 7.9 or 8%? Will you still claim conspiracy?

2) Were you questioning the unemployment numbers under Obama when they were above 9%? If it's all a conspiracy, why were you not complaining then?

3) Were you questioning the numbers during his entire administration, minus the last week, when they were above 8% when he promised that the stimulus would prevent that from happening?

All of those scenarios I have listed above are bad for Obama. Even the current 7.8% number is still dismal. If you are consistent in your position of the numbers being bogus, and are not just complaining whenever they don't go your way (despite the fact that every American should be happy about a falling unemployment rate), why were you not bringing this up in the past?

Pretty strange to leave a large state out, expecially if it's California, the so-called 8th largest economy in the world.

Name one good reason for releasing the report at this time with only 49 of the 50 states included.

It's dishonest.

In order:

But it hasn't has it?
These are really the same question. I never said it was "all" a conspiracy, but it certainly is odd that right when it serves Obama's purpose, weird outliers and statistically significant errors start creeping into the BLS numbers, isn't it? Particularly when the inevitable corrections will come later and buried in the back half of a word-wall report.

The logical error you're committing is thinking that just because something didn't happen before means it isn't happening now.

Lastly, I've been questioning the unemployment rate calculations since I graduated from college, for reasons given below.
Actually, high reported unemployment in the first two years serves Obama's narrative just fine...as the steward of an inherited mess that he must take increasingly severe actions to clean up. Saying that's "bad" for him doesn't entirely ring true, not from a political standpoint. He got elected exactly because of a bad jobs climate.

On the larger point, the unemployment situation in this country is not getting better. The unemployment rate only lists a percentage of people who cannot find work desipte their actively seeking it. When people drop out of the labor force (aka the labor participation rate) they no longer are counted in the unemployment rate. And the labor participation rate is decreasing. So no, contextually this "falling unemployment rate" is not cause for happiness.

ETA:

I was going to put this into a second post, but I might as well keep it all together. Apologies for the length.

Here's why I'm questioning the unemployment numbers, and sorry for the background but it's important. There are two surveys done every month. The first is one done of businesses, and the survey is done of 410,000 businesses. The second is the household survey done by phone to 60,000 homes. Now the thing is, the household survey has lots of ups and downs, but this latest unemployment number is questionable because the big spike is even bigger than usual. But it's that household survey that is used for the actual unemployment rate. The business survey is used to calculate net job creation/month.

And when you look at the household survey, it's saying 873,000 jobs were created last month. Almost a million jobs. In one month. And that's a lot.

However, to put this number into context, let's look at the last time we got a million jobs created in a month. It was 1983. We were coming off the Carter Recession and Good Time Were Here. We were getting flush. So flush that we even put up with Wham!. So flush that our GDP growth rate was 9.3% In that economy, it was so hot that you could play hardball with your boss vis a vis raises and promotions. You could leave your job on a whim and know you'd have a new one in a month or two when you got tired of the Sally Jesse Raphael show.

That's contrasted with 1.4ish% today. Does today feel like 1983 to you?

That isn't to say we haven't had similar jumps with lower growth rates. Other times GDP growth has been at the 5-5.5% level and job creation jumps were close to 1983 levels. But there's never been a job jump with such an anemic growth rate like we have today.

So here, I kind of reject the premise that to believe this number is faulty is to necessarily believe in some grand conspiracy. You don't have to cotton to the thought that someone is deliberately cooking the books to think this looks very odd. OTOH, as I said to you in the other thread, this is an administration that is illegally telling contractors to ignore the WARN act and promises taxpayer money will be there to satisfy any law suits.

As simply and plainly as I can put it...there is no way this economy created 873,000 jobs last month. There is no independent data confirming it (hey, did payroll tax collection jump by a similar margin?) and the payroll survey directly refutes it. So you can believe it's true (in which case you're wrong), you can think it's wrong but there was an error somewhere (in which case it seems awfully convenient), or you can think someone took a more active hand in massaging the data (in which case you're probably a cynic.).

Pick one. :)

No, but it certainly could. The number has gone up plenty of times over his administration. The chart below is from the BLS' website. If the number is bogus, why does it continually increase, then decrease, then increase again etc? If they're in the tank for Obama, why has it been over his magical 8% for so long? Was the number also bogus when GW was president? What about before him?


http://imageshack.us/a/img253/1545/chartr.jpg

Since I have not researched the history of this "error", I can't comment on that in earnest. This weekend when I've had some time to do that, I could give you a better answer. If it turns out that the data was released missing a state, and that has never happened before, or only happened once or twice, then yes, it would be suspicious.

I'm not saying that it's not possible, what I am saying is that if it is occurring, the pattern it has followed makes absolutely no sense. This is where conspiracy theories fall flat. Almost always, as soon as you start to dig a little deeper, you find things that are at complete odds with the entire theory - some of which I have already pointed out: the increasing and decreasing and then increasing again, the fact that it's been over 8% his entire administration minus the last week, etc.

Can you point me to any actual threads or posts that show you specifically questioning the rate when it does not suit your political agenda?

Then why didn't they bring it under 8% some time after the stimulus was passed? The stimulus is about the only thing other than Obamacare that he can point to and say "I did that." The entire premise was that it would prevent unemployment from going above 8%. That didn't happen - if they truly had the ability to rig the numbers, that would be the first thing they would have done.

Right, because a person who is not looking for work can't possibly be helpful in understanding how hard it is to find a job. There is no perfect way of doing it, but that is certainly the best way. You can't include people who are not seeking work in a stat that tries to define how hard or easy it is to find work.

Uh don't know where you get your information but... actual unemployment requests WITHOUT California reporting increased by 26,000 but after the numbers were "adjusted" they showed a decrease of applications of 30,000. According to Business News Weekly

The only people rooting against the economy is the present administration who has been doing all it can to destroy the economy, and those who follow Obama like sheep.

A good economy means a powerful USA and that is exactly what Obama and his liberals dont want. Damnedest thing I've ever seen!

Alternate Unemployment-Charts


-On mobile

IvanVic, you are taking my comments vis a vis the BLS new jobless claims report and extending them to the calculation of the unemployment rate as a whole. I think you should be clear that they are two different things.

That said:

So you are taking a hypothetical and casting it as a factual occurence.

I posted two links (and not of the "questionable" sort) where a Labor economist is quoted as saying exactly that a state was left out. If you find another instance of that happening I'm all ears.

But again, you're assuming that chicanery isn't happening now if it hasn't happened before. I'm saying that's a faulty assumption.

Um, GlockTalk wasn't even invented when I was in college. :upeyes:

You know, I'm of the opinion that murder is bad, yet you're suggesting that if I don't have any posts specifically saying that then my opinion can be questioned.


And again, you're assuming whomever would have even hit on a good way to game numbers back then, or even thought to do it. And you're also suggesting that if it didn't happen (as you assume) that necessarily implies an inability to do so. That's a shaky logic chain there.

It is a statistic, and like all statistics it has to be taken in context with complementary data. The rate is intended to describe how many people who want a job have one. However, it fails because it assumes that people who aren't actively looking day in and day out don't want jobs, and that is turning out to be a weak assumption in this economy. Perhaps the job market is such that someone wants a job but can't find one so he goes back to school. Perhaps someone stopped looking and moved in with his parents and is waiting for things to turn around before looking again. I'd call them unemployed, but the BLS wouldn't.

So while there may not be "a better way" to calculate it, it's a serious mistake to look at the number in a vaccuum. The best complementary data is the labor force participation rate. It serves to really tell you how many people out there are working. When that rate declines in concert with an unemployment rate decrease (or one that's static), that gives you all kinds of insights that you wouldn't get by looking at the unemployment rate alone. In fact, if you confined yourself to the unemployment rate you'd be seriously misled as to the true state of the economy.

Easy there big fella... Just injecting a little sarcasm. GWSHARK didn't get it either apparently. Of course these numbers are cooked!

Nothing is beyond this president. He's pulling all the strings.

I am posting a hypothetical question, yes. However, that hypothetical is not that unlikely when you look at the BLS' chart. The number has decreased, and then increased the following month on numerous occasions. You seem to be specifically avoiding the history of the rate under Obama, and also avoiding my hypothetical question, because both blow a gigantic hole right in the middle of this conspiracy theory.

And if it turns out that this has not happened before, I would agree that it is suspicious.

You are making a claim, that Obama has direct control over the unemployment rate. I am not assuming anything. I am examining past data and pointing out to you that your theory makes no sense when reviewing that past data. You only have a leg to stand on if you're claiming that Obama has suddenly, in the last 2 weeks, taken over the BLS and has direct control of their reporting. Well, this isn't the first time the unemployment numbers have been questioned here, so that's not what the posters here have been saying.

It says below your avatar that you have been a member since the year 2000. Can you point me to a single post of yours that questions the rate when it does not suit your agenda? Those examples would be either an instance of you claiming the rate was bogus when it goes down under a Republican president, or claiming it's bogus when it goes up under a Democrat president. Either will do.

This analogy is so ridiculous I can't believe you went with it. I'll make it even easier for you, can you show me a post from ANY ONE of the conspiracy theorists in these unemployment threads that have made posts equivalent to what I have suggested above in bold font?

Of course that is a weakness, but it's setup that way because it's the only possible method that would achieve some type of consistency across both good and bad economies. If you included people who are not actively seeking work in the unemployment rate, the number would be artificially high, especially during good economies, because lazy people who don't want a job would be artificially raising the rate.

Yes, you are correct when you assume that the number might be a bit artificially low when discouraged workers drop out of the labor force in a bad economy because they can't find a job, but the number of lazy people will far outweigh the number of discouraged job seekers in any economy.

Expanding on that, I'd like to bold this because I think it's an essential point: I'd argue that if you give up looking for work because you can't find a job, you either have no education, have a criminal record, are lazy, don't have any marketable skills, have very poor social skills, or a combination of the above. Then there's that tiny sliver of people who do have an education, no serious criminal record, have interviewing skills, are not lazy, yet still somehow decide to stop looking for work. In all my years, I've yet to meet a single one of these educated, non-lazy, sociable people with interviewing skills who choose to sit on the couch instead of look for a job.

As long as it's under 8% it's a plus for Obama. Plus keep in mind early/absentee voting is going to be over long before the final report comes out. So this 7.8% figure from this week is the big one in terms of impact on the election. You are going to hear about it over and over again in these last three debates. It's bogus as hell though and will be "adjusted" in November, just you watch.

Oh, then in that case, ................... never mind. :supergrin:

Here's my prediction for Jay Carney lines in tomorrow's WH Press briefing:

"No, We did not mislead and had no intention to mislead with the employment numbers."

"We had never said that these employment figures are complete figures, and it really depends on how you would define 'unemployment'. "

"The President of the United States did state the facts correctly."

BHO did say nearly four years ago that these are the redefining moments for America. Sure enough, his administration is redefining the definitions of:
-Terrorism
-unemployment
-economic recovery

and more. It is "transparently" clear!

I have to wonder when he's on the golf course, he'd redefined how golf scores are kept, or introduce another concept called ObamaMath and ObamaEnglish.