Friday Night Music
46 minutes ago
Friday, October 5, 2012
My challenge to the BLS truthers
. - by New deal democrat
Sadly but predictably, following this morning's employment report, a nest of non-believers has come crawling out of the woodwork to claim that the particularly good household suvery report of over 800,000 job added to the labor force is a pro-Obama government conspiracy.
Well, I have a challenge for the conspiracy theorists. In the last three months, the establishment survey (from which we get the payrolls number) showed growth of 437,000 jobs. The smaller and more volatile household survey, conducted by an entirely different government agency (the census bureau) showed growth of 559,000 jobs. In short, averaged over three months, the two surveys were rather close.
Why the big one month difference? Because, as I said, the household survey is much more volatile. In July and August combined, the household survey showed a loss of -314,000 jobs, while the establishment survey showed a gain of over 200,000 jobs.
So here is my challenge. Since the two surveys averaged out similarly over the three month period, it must have been true that the household survey numbers in July and August were equally cooked. If you were intellectually honest, surely you wrote about those phony numbers too. Didn't you?
Because otherwise, I have no choice but to conclude that you are an intellectually dishonest shill.
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6 comments:
Well, the ADP survey--by a private company, of private payrolls--showed a better-than-expected gain this week. Wouldn't the trutherism be more credible in a month when ADP really disagreed with the BLS?
http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr;sid=8ba82ee2ee77aeb676615c9ac1eb7c9b;rgn=div2;view=text;node=20120813%3A1.3;idno=7;cc=ecfr;start=1;size=25
The BLS jobless rate is calculated on a monthly survey of eligible households. The definition of “eligible households” is found at the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 7, Part 273 – Certification of Eligible Households. If you go there, you will find an Amendment to the Code, published on August 13, 2012, in 77 FR 48056. On June 16th, President Obama announced a new immigration policy that says illegal immigrants younger than 30, who meet certain minimal requirements, can get a two-year deferral from deportation and apply for work permits. Napolitano said that participants must be in the United States now and be able to prove they have been living in the country continuously for at least five years. The government began accepting applications on August 15th and the news agencies generally agreed that between 1.2 and 1.7 million applications were expected. Now we go back to the August 13th Amendment to the CFR regarding the calculation of eligible households participating in the BLS survey. The Amendment simply takes those who were previously disqualified for alien status and now makes them eligible households. And that’s how we identify the “unexpected” change in the September jobless rate.
So, there was a change in the method of calculation, which was initiated by the Administration, with regard to immigration, which impacted the employment figures. Coincidence??? Or did Obama not want to deport these people entirely out of the goodness of his heart? The people who act as Obama's handlers are unbelievably slick.
^
That was completely stupid. Those people were all ALREADY here, including for the August jobs report. How would letting people stay here, who were ALREADY here, and who ALREADY have been counted in previous jobs surveys, suddenly and magically create new jobs?
The provision of the Code of Federal Regulations that Anonymous refers to actually deals with eligibility for reciept of food stamps and the release of data to state agencies about disqualified recipients. Why Anonymous thinks this has anything to do with the BLS Household Survey is baffling. Anonymous might try attending Law School before any further attempts to interpret the Federal Regulations.
This cooked books argument is idiotic. Putting aside the fact that BLS is run by career, professional people, it just makes no sense that even political hacks would have started with funny numbers now. Why not for the August numbers to give Obama a huge boost coming out of the convention? Or earlier, when the GOP candidates were slugging it out, to take the wind out of their sails. Or during the midterms runup? Or....
The conspiracy theory is a bit ridiculous. But note that over 600,000 of the 800,000 net new jobs the Household survey reported over the last three months have been in government employment. Actually almost all that govt hiring was reported for the past two months. So Did the government suddenly have the biggest two month hiring spree in 50 years? Or is this a statistical outlier?
As far as the Household survey being an indicator for the economy is concerned - the survey has shown over 400k of net job losses in the private sector for "wages and salary workers" since June. This is very very indicative of recession for the US economy.
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