Put Down The Champagne, Those New Unemployment Numbers Are Probably WAY OFF

The Lid/Fox News ^ | 2/5/2010 | The Lid

[Shellybenoit]

Surprise, surprise, the white house got to use the word unexpected for a good reason. This morning they announced that the unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly in January to 9.7 percent. Strangely at the same time they announced that employers shed 20,000 jobs. A paradox? Certainly until you realize that the job losses are calculated from a separate survey of employers.

At the same time the labor department revised its past employment estimates to show that job losses from the recession have been much worse than previously stated. The economy has shed 8.4 million jobs since the downturn began in December 2007, up from a previous figure of 7.2 million. The numbers have only been corrected through March 2009, and there are strong reasons to believe that the survey data since then also needs to be adjusted downward. The reports are often wrong says John Lotte, economist and author of "Freedomnomics"

[gibtx2]

they are government numbers ... like global warming they are manipulated to be political advantage for a program to make some fat cat wealth.

[MNJohnnie]

So we are back to the Clinton era game.

During the Clinton years, they would over estimate the job gains and under estimate the losses to manufacture fraudulent propaganda for the Clinton regime.

Bush changed that. His administration tried to be as accurate as possible. Almost always they revised up the job gains after the fact.

Now we are back to the 0 regime massaging the number to generate favorable propaganda, then fixing their over optimistic numbers much later.

[gwilhelm56]

Harry Potter is more Believable than these Unemployment numbers....

[gwilhelm56]

Harry Potter is more Believable than these Unemployment numbers....

[Fawn]

Did anyone watch “The Office” last night? It showed what happens to a person when unemployed ...LOL

[Doogle]

numbers game....if you lower the number of JOBS (people working) from 135 million to 129 million like they did last week and add in the 800,000 lost jobs they DIDN'T COUNT last year the number is 10.6% unemployed. (the U6) number..???..remember Rick Santelli? (sp) the guy who suggested TEA PARTY....he has it right. They will say a million “new” jobs have been counted when they count the short lived CENSUS takers too.....

[TV Dinners]

Rahm left a Horses head in someones bed over at the Labor Dept...

[CPT Clay]

But the stimulas is working!!!

[JerseyHighlander]

Look, we’ve butted heads before about you blogpimping on FR. Even as I generally like your commentary and your positions on various topics, your lack of linking to original source links materially degrades the quality of one of freerepublic’s central purposes of archiving original content.

Specifically recently you posted the entirety of the SOTU address on your blog, and didn’t post a link to the whitehouse.gov link to the prepared text. That is of course understandable as you had like 30 minutes to post before the speech, but it’s that type of stuff that causes problems in say 5 or 7 years from now when someone wants to search the archives, your blog has closed down, and you have left FR’s database with hundreds of exception 404’s in excerpt links.

However, if you are going to specifically name a long known original content provider to freerepublic in your blogpimp lede excerpt, at least spell his name right!

Professor John Lott,
http://www.freerepublic.com/~johnrlott/
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/johnlott/index

Regards,