Democrats, Progressive Republicans Take Sledge Hammer to Economy

Bloomberg reports that the economy is in a tailspin.  The unemployment rate is now 9.7%, 0.2% lower than last month, but that statistic deceives.  Last month, there were 431,000 new jobs with 411,000 census workers hired. Only 41,000 private sector workers were hired.  Manufacturing jobs increased by 29,000  while service jobs, mostly temporary, increased by 27,000. The retail job number fell.

The labor force fell by over 200,000.  A statistical characteristic of the unemployment rate is that people not in the labor force are not counted in the unemployment rate. So if you give up looking for a job you are not counted.  200,000 left in response to the policies of Obama and the Democrats. They are so great at helping the average American. 

Now if you subtract the 200,000 who left the labor force and the 411,000 temporary census jobs from the 431,000 new jobs, do you really find an improvement in unemployment?

The truth is that the unemployment rate is too low.  The reason is that the government has subsidized badly run businesses that should be terminated and much of government is pure waste.  Rather than subsidize and stimulate waste as the Democrats have, the incompetently run businesses need to close.

Money should have been spent on welfare subsidies to the unemployed, whose lives have been upended by the incompetence of the Progressive/Keynesian economic system. Instead, the economy has been put on life support and the misallocation of investment will cause continued decline until the Democrats and Progressive Republicans are booted out of office.

I feel sorry for my students, who look forward to suffering economically because of the moron whom they voted into office, Barack Obama.

Has the Obama Administration Turned Government Statistics into Soviet-Style Propaganda?

Right Wing News (h/t Larwyn's Links) discusses a New York Post article that claims that the Census Bureau has engaged in considerable fudging of its employment roll.  The Bureau hires people and then fires them after only a few hours work, then hires a replacement, then fires the replacement after a few hours, etc.  The churning of employment has, according to the article, potentially bloated the US Department of Labor's employment data. Thus, the Obama administration may have significantly distorted the non-seasonally adjusted 9.9% unemployment reported last month. John Crudele of the Post writes:

"Each month Census gives Labor a figure on the number of workers it has hired. That figure goes into the closely followed monthly employment report Labor provides. For the past two months the hiring by Census has made up a good portion of the new jobs...Labor doesn't check the Census hiring figure or whether the jobs are actually new or recycled. It considers a new job to have been created if someone is hired to work at least one hour a month...One hour! A month! So, if a worker is terminated after only one hour and another is hired in her place, then a second new job can apparently be reported to Labor . (I've been unable to get Census to explain this to me.)

I used to think that government statistics are accurate, even sacrosanct.  There have been increasing numbers of questions about inflation data.  For instance, the exclusion of house costs reduced the stated inflation rate from the early 1980s until the housing price collapse, when some pundits started to suggest that house prices should be included in the inflation rate.  It is not clear how quality adjustments are integrated into the inflation rate.  Nor is it clear how the size of a given product influences it.  For example, for the past 10 years or so I haven't bothered with a big charcoal grill, just purchasing a small hibachi from Wal-Mart.  Until recently they were about $20, but this year it was $25.  But the quality had been significantly reduced. It is much less steady and the materials used are cheaper.  Were those changes included in the inflation rate?

Increasingly government data seems like propaganda.  The Census Bureau's manipulation of the unemployment rate suggests that the Obama administration does not shy from the use of official information for propagandistic purposes.