State and local governments have let go 102,000 more employees than they have added in the last three months, and economists are concerned that with revenue so depressed, school payrolls could shrink more in coming months.
Links for 05-25-2013
4 minutes ago
4 comments:
No matter how you cut it, it doesn't look good. I just got a list of things that students need to buy for school and frankly I was dumbfounded with some of the things. Tissue paper, toilet paper, etc. Really? It's little wonder that local governments are laying off.
Of course the jobless claims are up. The "recovery" policies have been absolutely devastating to our economy. It will stretch on for years if the government doesn't take it's hands off. They don't seem to understand that there is no magic money tree and that in this climate small business is afraid to take any risk.
"The ICSC reported same store sales for the week ending August 14 rose 3.3% vs. a year earlier, and declined -1.3% from the prior week. This is still a good showing, but less so than the 4% YoY comparisons we were seeing a month ago."
There over 3% less stores than a year ago, so the numbers aren't impressive by any stretch. Did you note the Walmart numbers last week? You have the majority of Walmart costumers getting massive amounts of govt transfer payments and unemployment insurance, etc but yet US total sales were flat in Q2 2010 from Q2 2009. The situation is even worse when you consider all the retailers that have gone under over the past year and all the retailers that have closed large numbers of chain stores over the past year.
Anon:
Well, first of all, your response is to the wrong blog entry. You should be directing your venom at me, not Bonddad, w/r/t to same store sales data.
Your claim is straight out of Mish, and I debunked it way back in March:
Mish also claims that the Census Bureau's retail sales data is bogus, claiming that it fails to account for "survivorship bias", in other words, that same store sales will increase if there are a fewer number of retail stores left. What Mish believes the Census Bureau lacks is - a birth/death model!
In fact, the Census Bureau statisticians are not idiots, and do account for this in a number of ways. The following description comes from my co-blogger, Silver Oz, this site's resident statistical geek:
From How the surveys are collected:
"Births are added to the monthly survey in February, May, August, and November of each year. At the same time, deaths are removed from the survey. To minimize the effect of births and deaths on the month-to-month change estimates, we phase-in these changes by incrementally increasing the sampling weights of the births and decreasing the sampling weights of the deaths in a similar fashion. In the first month, we tabulate the births at one-third their sampling weight and tabulate the deaths at two-thirds their sampling weight. In the second month, we tabulate the births at two-thirds their sampling weight and tabulate the deaths at one-third their sampling weight. In the third month, we tabulate the births at their full sampling weight and the deaths are dropped (sampling weight equal zero)."
And here is the reliability of the survey:
The alleged survivor bias argument appears to be addressed by both the methodology and the error in the survey itself, as the survey seems to take a gross sales number (ie dollars) and uses IRS and EIN's to identify firms for the survey (including deaths). So, while he is correct in that surviving firms have a bigger slice of the pie (master of the obvious!), that does not imply that the pie itself necessarily shrunk and the methodology seems to take care of his fears.
To which I would add that the Census Bureau also uses a chain weighting which ensures month to month consistency:
Estimation and sampling variance
Advance sales estimates for the most detailed industries are computed using a type of ratio estimator known as the link-relative estimator. For each detailed industry, we compute a ratio of current-to-previous month weighted sales using data from units for which we have obtained usable responses for both the current and previous month. The For each detailed industry, the advance total sales estimates for the current month is computed by multiplying this ratio by the preliminary sales estimate for the previous month (derived from the larger MRTS) at the appropriate industry level. Total estimates for broader industries are computed as the sum of the detailed industry estimates.
In other words, the Census Bureau tracks respondents for several months. If any go out of business, they get zeroed out. The statisticians aren't dunces. They account for exactly the issue Mish complains about, except he wasn't inquiring enough to check their actual procedures.
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Now, Anon, if you have proof that despite their methodoligies designed to eliminate survivor bias, the Census Bureau is not successful, feel free to post it. But unless and until you do, your criticism is busted.
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