Posted on 04/23/2007 4:47:08 AM PDT by Brilliant
No single government statistic has a weightier impact on public policy, the stock market and even the public mood than the monthly jobs number... Pity, then, that these employment numbers have become unreliable.
How off-track are they? The Department of Labor undercounted the number of Americans working by just under one million from April 2005 through March 2006. The original monthly reports suggested 1.9 million new jobs, but the final revisions were corrected to 2.85 million. That means about one of every three new jobs wasn't detected by the statisticians at the DOL. These lowball estimates were eventually corrected, but few other than economic professionals pay much attention to job tallies that come one month to a year after the fact. Reversing the damage of an overly pessimistic jobs report is as futile as trying to unring a bell...
An analysis by economists at First Trust Advisors in Chicago has found that from April 2006 through February 2007 (the latest revised numbers available), the federal government originally reported almost one-half million fewer Americans working than actually were working. On average, the first monthly forecast for this period was 113,000 jobs; the second report from a month later counted 138,000 new jobs; and the final revision was 157,000 jobs. Whoops. So this year, one of every four new jobs flew below the government's statistical radar...
What's the problem? Well, the Labor Department seems to be using old statistical techniques to measure the dynamics of the new economy. The government publishes two different job estimates. The one that gets big play in the media is the establishment or "payroll" survey -- which asks some 300,000 large employers about their hiring patterns. The second is the smaller household survey, which randomly calls people on the phone and asks whether the adults ...are working...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
what is:
naive
overly-trusting
feckless
pious
weak
...
yes, the answer is the bush administration
1) The number of new companies (business growth) or specifically, the number of Tax IDs issued to businesses in the US during that month
and
2) The monthly income revenue / person. That is, take the total income tax revenue, and divide it by the total number of tax payers.
and
3) New jobs - new with holdings filed with the IRS
I suspect these numbers would be far closer to reality.
Explain to me what motive the current administration’s people in the DOL have in under reporting the number of jobs.
And if they do have some reason to falsely report the numbers - why are they still in the job?
Something just doesn’t add up.
They are government employees working for the Labor Department and living in Washington, DC. What’s the likelihood that they are Republicans? And you can’t fire them. They are “Civil Servants.”
For example more and more people are self employed. Some of which don’t report their income at all... And then there’s small business which employs the majority of people and is constantly changing day to day.
It’s always nice to get a well-researched opinion on FR. Why don’t you try it someday?
it’s always nice to get a well-researched and reasoned unsolicited editorial to a post
get it?
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