Mainstream Business Journalists Lie about Job Creation during the Bush Admin (Hard Data from BLS)

Bureau of Labor Statistics (link is to current report) ^ | August 8, 2004 | SELF (From BLS Data)

[litany_of_lies]

Total Employment up 1.87 Million during Bush Admin and Almost 4 mil since Jan. 2002 (from BLS Data)

The question I set out to answer is:

When the mainstream business press claims that "millions of jobs have been lost during the Bush Adminitration," is it true?

The quick answer isn't "no," it's "Heck no!"

Here's the proof (all are seasonally adjusted and retroactively take into account methodology changes during the past 4 years):
- Total employment in the entire economy (June 2004) 139.660 million
- Total employment in the entire economy (Jan. 2001) 137.790 million
- Total employment in the entire economy (Jan. 2002) 135.705 million

Therefore:
- Growth in total employment during the Bush Admin: 1.870 million
- Growth in total employment since Jan. 2002 trough: 3.955 million

There's not a negative number to be found.

So the truth is:
- Almost 4 million more people are working now than were working 2-1/2 years ago after the post-Sept. 11, 2001 downturn.
- Almost 1.9 million jobs have been created in the 3-1/2 years of the Bush Administration.

Let your friends and enemies know the truth..

It's clear that the business reporters in the mainstream media are as biased and dishonest as the rest of them (this was not always so).

[litany_of_lies]

If you wish, you can recreate the table I generated to get this data by going to:

http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab1.htm

When you get there, check off the "Seasonally Adjusted" box for "Employed," scroll down, and click on "Retrieve Data."

If anyone knows how to post the table, go for it.

[Reagan Man]

Data extracted on: August 8, 2004 (5:06:26 PM)

Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey

Series Id:           LNS12000000 Seasonal Adjusted Series title:        (Seas) Employment Level Labor force status:  Employed Type of data:        Number in thousands Age:                 16 years and over
Year	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec	Annual
1994	121966	122086	121930	122290	122864	122634	122706	123342	123687	124112	124516	124721
1995	124663	124928	124955	124945	124421	124522	124816	124852	125133	125388	125188	125088
1996	125125	125639	125862	125994	126244	126602	126947	127172	127536	127890	127771	127860
1997	128298	128298	128891	129143	129464	129412	129822	130010	130019	130179	130653	130679
1998	130726	130807	130814	131209	131325	131244	131329	131390	131986	131999	132280	132602
1999	133027	132856	132947	132955	133311	133378	133414	133591	133707	133993	134309	134523
2000	136561(1)	136599	136668	137264	136611	136923	136516	136701	136908	137124	137316	137632
2001	137790	137581	137738	137275	137063	136842	137091	136314	136869	136447	136234	136078
2002	135715	136362	136106	136096	136505	136353	136478	136811	137337	137079	136545	136459
2003	137447(1)	137318	137300	137578	137505	137673	137604	137693	137644	138095	138533	138479
2004	138566(1)	138301	138298	138576	138772	139031	139660
1 : Data affected by changes in population controls in January 2000, January 2003 and January 2004.

[demlosers]

Well, the next time you hear some misinformed reporter say 'There has been less jobs created under the Bush administration,' you can call his BS.

[lelio]

Growth in total employment during the Bush Admin: 1.870 million

Is that over 42 months? That's only 45k a month. How many jobs need to be created just to absorb those entering the workforce?

[Republitarian]

YES! This is exactly the kind of information I needed to get my brother-in-law back into the world of reality. He's Republican, but is pissed at GW for not leveling Fallujah in and not kicking more butt in Iraq AND has been souding like a Democrap about everything. Scary. Like: "Sure, jobs have been created, but only low paying service jobs. And not that many jobs have actually been created." Blah Blah Blah. I sent your post to him. Thanks, Reagan Man.

[steplock]

1 : Data affected by changes in population controls in January 2000, January 2003 and January 2004.


What is that ? A reason for the disparity between the DNC claims & the WH claims ??

It has to be explained.

[litany_of_lies]

I'll agree that 45k/month on average isn't that great over 3-1/2 years, but the counterpoints are strong:
- The 4 mil since the trough in Jan. of 2002 (29 months) is an average of about 135,000 per month. This is pretty good but not oustanding.
- Bush really isn't accountable for the first 12 months because of Sept. 11, and even if Sept. 11 hadn't occurred, the first budget passed by his Administration didn't go into effect until Oct. 1, 2001.
- The first year of the Bush Admin represented the rest of the comedown from the dot-com bubble that began in early 2000 in the Clinton Administration.

Finally, I read in CFO magazine that companies have tons of cash but aren't spending it because of economic and security uncertainty. A Bush re-election would I believe relieve a lot of that, and the economy will really roar in 2005-2006 (crossing fingers).

[litany_of_lies]

Thanks for getting the table.

[steplock]

By the Way! EXCELLENT~!!~

[litany_of_lies]

I don't claim to understand it totally.

The most important thing to know is that the DOL retroactively changes all previous data to reflect the pop control changes they make. Thus, you know you are comparing apples to apples when going back to previous years. I know this because I get the DOL employment report by e-mail every month. My old e-mails don't tie in to current DOL data, and they shouldn't, because the pop controls have been applied to all previous reports. Maybe I should ask for retroactive e-mails (fat chance).

Whether there's any bias in the attempts to change the population controls I can't tell. I would tend to doubt it.

If you're looking for the cause of a more current DNC-WH dispute, it's that the overall June employment numbers showed a 629,000 increase in the number of people working, but only a 32,000 gain in non-farm employment. This is absurd on the face of it, because it would mean that 597,000 additional people found work on farms in June. The WH is trumpeting the slight drop in the unemployment rate (to 5.5%) and the 629,000 growth in the workforce, while the DNC, as you would expect, only cares about the non-farm number.

The truly sad part of this is that the business press is only focusing on the 32,000, and the markets are plunging beccause of it. If I had a bunch of money to invest, I would be doing it right now because I think the markets have been fooled into doom and gloom.

[steplock]

"Household data, based on a survey."

Hmmm --- The question is then ....

Would the surveys reflect MORE working if those surveyed felt safe revealing "underground economy sources"? Or LESS? Could that have an effect?

I would almost see a higher TRUE number in the survey - especially since many people - though working - are home based and NOT in the government "eye".

[litany_of_lies]

The household survey is, as I understand it, considered more credible, because it's better at picking up self-employed and work-at-home folks than the establishment survey, which is of existing businesses.

[Dave S]

That's only 45k a month. How many jobs need to be created just to absorb those entering the workforce?

About 150,000 new jobs are needed monthly to absorb those entering the job market.

[Gun142]

btt

[speekinout]

June employment numbers showed a 629,000 increase in the number of people working, but only a 32,000 gain in non-farm employment. This is absurd on the face of it, because it would mean that 597,000 additional people found work on farms in June.

No. The "employment numbers" only count people who were hired by large companies. They don't count the self-employed or start-up companies.
There are a lot of self-employed one way or another, and a growing number of people who are self-employed as "consultants".
A lot of companies are hiring more consultants these days - the consultants get higher hourly rates than employees, but they're on their own for health ins. and pensions. I think that trend will continue. I know several people who have changed status to consultant, and they like it. IRA's make the pension issue irrelevant.

[JLS]

You are falling for one of the mistake too. Here are the BLS numbers one might use to discuss whether or not jobs have grown during the Bush Administration:

1. Household data:

Jan 2001: 136,181,000
July 2004: 140,700,000
Net Change: +4,519,000


2. Seasonally adjusted Household data:

Jan 2001: 136,561,000
July 2004: 139,660,000
Net Change: +3,099,000


3. Establishment data:

Jan 2001: 109,680,000
July 2004: 110,694,000
Net Change: +1,014,000


4. Seasonally adjusted Household data:

Jan 2001: 111,560,000
July 2004: 109,743,000
Net Change: -1,817,000

So we have four measures of job growth in the economy. Three of them show a growth of jobs of between 1 million and a bit over 4.5 million jobs. The third shows a loss of a little over 1.8 million jobs.

Now what can we say about these data:

1. The real world is not seasonally adjusted. It is important for economists like me when we are trying to analyze the time-series properties of the behavior of employment to use the two seasonally adjusted data. In the world people live in MORE REAL PEOPLE HAVE REAL JOBS TODAY THAN IN JAN 2000 BY BOTH THE ESTABLISHMENT AND HOUSEHOLD MEASURES.

2. It is an oddity that one of these measures disagrees. Possibly something is changing in the way the seasonal adjustment factors should be applied to the actual data. Time will tell on that.

3. Establishment data is private sector employment. So it not only ignors people who work for themselves, it ignors government sector jobs. How ironic is it that the Dims are now demanding that we ignor government sector employment in this discussion. The Dims do everything they can to make private employment more difficult, OHSA, family leave, payroll taxes ect, and everything they can to force more government employment, exempting government from FICA etc, and then demand that we discuss employment on the basis of the establishment data only BECAUSE IT FITS THEIR NEEDS THIS ELECTION CYCLE.

4. It is not a surprise that the Dims [it is their job] and their water carriers in the press [it is NOT their job] are focusing in on the number that is least informative politically.

5. But keep in mind they can always find something to complain about. The nonseasonally adjusted establishment data showed a DROP in employment last month, so they and their water carriers in the media would be focusing on the drop in private establishment employment LAST MONTH were they focusing on the better political measure. This is an important lesson. The data do not matter. The Dims and their water carriers would be complaining about something else, if they were forced to drop their employment lie. Again that is how the opposition is suppose to behave in a free country. THE PROBLEM IS THE MEDIA OR SO MUCH OF THE MEDIA SINGING FROM THE SONG BOOK OF ONE PARTY ONLY. This undermines a free society.

6. But the good news is what I said at the end of point 1 above. People do not look to the BLS to know if they or their friend have jobs. They do not seasonally adjust themselve and say well actually 1 less of my friends would have a job if I seasonally adjusted our situation. They vote on the economy as they see it in their live not on what the BLS says. The BLS is not some master employer in the economy as IGNORANT REPORTERS pretend. The BLS is trying to measure the behavior of the public which the public collectively knows better than the BLS.

[Reagan Man]

Check this out. BLS on Payroll vs. Household Survey

[Reagan Man]

See post #18.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

Another household v. payroll argument. Again?!

Yes, the payroll survey depends upon the responses of some 400,000 businesses and does not count "self employed." The household survey counts unpaid work. See how the government calculates unemployment

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

Here is from an earlier post, my emphasis.

http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1083158/posts

"Because the household survey is a sample, the Bureau of Labor Statistics infers the total change in jobs by multiplying the ratio of employed to unemployed workers in the household survey by its estimate of the total population. If the population estimate is too high, the estimated number of jobs will also be too high.

"THE Bureau of Labor Statistics bases its population estimate on the 2000 census, but it updates that estimate yearly with data on births, deaths and immigration. Immigration numbers are largely guesswork, however, because so much immigration is illegal. Fed officials suspect that the immigration estimate is inflated, because it fails to reflect tighter immigration controls after Sept. 11, 2001, as well as declines caused by the economic slowdown.

"Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics lowered its population estimate in January. Plugging the new estimate into the previous household surveys, the bureau found nearly half the apparent increase in jobs during the last three years vanished." [End excerpt]

See the table posted in #2. Note 1 : Data affected by changes in population controls in January 2000, January 2003 and January 2004.

Take a look at the figures. We lost around 200,000 jobs between late 2003 and early 2004 -- at a time that the payroll survey was showing the creation of tens of thousands of jobs.

Meanwhile ILLEGAL immigration starting skyrocketing in early spring in response to the President's "amnesty" plan. The Census population estimated went up, I suppose. Therefore, more jobs "created."

Just by saying this I've crossed into the "Bush bashing" zone, I suppose. I'll go for broke. The Pew Hispanic Center released a study recently that stated of the 1.3 million jobs created (official payroll survey numbers) almost 29 percent of the jobs were taken by "recent" immigrants. Established immigrants and citizens remained unemployed (8.2 million according to the BLS)

I heard the President say recently that the economy is going through a change -- indeed it is! And it's not for the first time. How many times have the farm-to-factory and buggywhip stories been posted here? Hundreds?

I just wish both sides (i.e., the employees of the media and the various political hacks) would give us a chance to execute the change. How long will it take? In the meantime hundreds of thousands of Americans have been affected and are paying the price because of the change; e.g., "globalization" and (ILLEGAL) "guest workers." IMO.