"A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men
from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
(Thomas Jefferson)


Saturday, May 21, 2011

Is Jobs Report being Manipulated for Political Purposes?

We found these comments from Town Hall Finance very interesting as it sheds new light on the figures that the Obama Administration releases monthly which frankly have seemed out of touch with reality. 
The biggest one is unemployment. Some are saying that the uptick to 9 percent is good because it implies more people are looking for work. You have to be looking for work to be considered unemployed. 
But as IBT points out the numbers participating in the job market have not risen.
"The labor force participation rate remained stuck at 64.2%, hence the increase in the unemployment rate to 9% from 8.8% is interesting. Usually you'd expect in recovery for more people to flood back into the job market seeking work, which is why the unemployment rate rising would not necessarily be a bad thing. However that was not the case in April. A more typical 66-67% labor force participation rate would add a few % to the unemployment rate."
Shedlock concludes:
"The official unemployment rate is 9.9%. However, if you start counting all the people that want a job but gave up, all the people with part-time jobs that want a full-time job, all the people who dropped off the unemployment rolls because their unemployment benefits ran out, etc., you get a closer picture of what the unemployment rate is. That number is ....much higher at 15.9 percent."
We could ask the question why the Obama Administration is not being truthful but what good would that do.  The Obama media won't say a peep when they know Obama or his political appointees are lying -- they ignore it acting like everything is okay.  Without the Internet, the facts would never get out as the Obama media twists the facts to suit their liberal agenda.  Looks at their spin on his second outreach to Muslim major speech at the 1967 borders of Israel being rolled back.  They acted like it was United States policy instead of Obama policy.  With that in mind, why would we expect any less of the media when it comes to the jobs report they breathlessly report every month.  If Obama's Administration says it is fact to them it is absolutely the truth without any further investigation so the American people get a false sense of what is reality from the Obama Media.
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Email John Ransom | Columnist's Archive  
Before joining Townhall, I was both a political consultant and a writer. I wrote mostly about the stock market. My father was a banker. His father was a banker.

Starting in 1994, I followed in my family’s tradition and I worked as an investment executive to several NYSE-member investment firms. I also co-founded a small boutique investment firm and worked for a merchant banker.

Then 19 hijackers crashed planes into buildings in NY City and Washington, D.C.
Because of that event, I altered the goals of my life considerably.

Welcome to Townhall Finance.

Coopmeister wrote: Businesses have added a net total of more than 250,000 jobs per month, on average, in the past three months. That's the fastest hiring spree in five years. –in response to my column O-pocalypse Now

Dear Coop,

As Mark Twain observed “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”

When he said “statistics” he might as well called out the government by name.
The problems with the jobs report is that it can be manipulated, and usually is, for political purposes.

I noted on our blog the Ticker on May 6th, “The BLS estimates birth and death of private companies and consequent jobs created by them. These numbers have no basis in fact. They are just numbers pulled out of the air.”

IBT confirmed it: "For those of you keeping track at home, the birth death adjustment was 175K [jobs], a quite massive figure."

And Townhall Finance columnist Mike Shedlock said at the time, "In recent years Birth/Death methodology has been so screwed up and there have been so many revisions that it has been painful to watch."

But getting past the numbers: Are you really trying to argue that the economy is in the best shape in five years? Is that why our debt has been downgraded and the dollar is tanking?

Is that why notable liberals like Warren Buffet and PIMCO’s Bill Gross are betting against the dollar and Treasuries?  

Source:  Town Hall
How many states are not allowing people to file new claims or repeat claims in the days before the ending report for the month in order to prop up the Obama numbers? It happened a few times in Oklahoma when we had a Democrat Governor as claims could not be filed on line for 4-5 days. Once you say there was a problem with the system, but twice, and then the third time at the same time of the month? We don't believe in coincidences. With a Republican Governor now we haven't heard of any problems with the system. Either her IT people are much better or more likely there is no manipulation going on today.

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