Obama's October surprise !!!!

[Chiefshrink]

7.8% unemployment rate

No wonder he doesn't have to do well in these debates

[tk13]

Originally Posted by mikey23545

Take another Xanax and get back to your well-deserved slumber...

I'm not a mentally ill person suggesting the Department of Labor is cooking the books. I mean that seriously, this is pretty much the equivalent of saying the government caused the Joplin tornado.

[ChiTown]

Originally Posted by cosmo20002

There is not "so much hate between the two sides over things like this."
Call it what it is--unhinged lunacy by the right.

A report was released--a report released every month--that contains jobs stats and an unemployment rate based on a specific formula. This formula--followed for years--accounts for the most recent job info and makes corrections to data on prior recent reports.

IT IS THE SAME PROCEDURE EVERY TIME. But the right doesn't like this month's report, so they come up with reasons it doesn't count. It is one side acting idiotic here.

LOL. This, coming from the Liberal Lap Dog

[Fish]

Originally Posted by tk13

The fact that there's so much hate between the two sides over things like this makes me depressed. It's actually probably the biggest sign this country may be in trouble. If anything positive that makes either side look good, the opposite party just gets in a frothy rabid rage and accuses the other side of lying. In this case, making some pretty serious conspiracy theory accusations, and frankly acting a bit crazy. It's amazing really. If Obama or Romney actually did fix the economy, half the country would never give the guy credit for it. People have basically become slaves to their political party.

This. The election season really brings out the worst in people. It's sad that the overwhelming majority would rather fight the other party than attempt any progress together. Many would rather see one side fail, than see both sides progress. We have two awful candidates to choose from, and both have shown more commitment to lobbyists and their own images than the actual American people. But the people don't care, because they'd rather point fingers and make accusations, than to admit that we're being screwed by both parties. But deep down, I think that's just how both parties prefer it. More blame on the opposite party, and less blame on the system as a whole.

[cosmo20002]

Originally Posted by tk13

I'm not a mentally ill person suggesting the Department of Labor is cooking the books. I mean that seriously, this is pretty much the equivalent of saying the government caused the Joplin tornado.

What's your point? Anyway, the government didn't cause it. God did. Because of gay marriage.

[cosmo20002]

Originally Posted by ChiTown

LOL. This, coming from the Liberal Lap Dog

Liberal/conservative has nothing to do with it. People who accept reports (and polling data) such as this when they like them, and reject them when they don't, are morons.

[Stewie]

Originally Posted by ChiTown

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The big drop in the unemployment rate a month before the presidential election brought cries of disbelief and conspiracy theories from Jack Welch and other critics of the Obama administration Friday. But the Labor Department was quick to dismiss such claims.
"Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers," tweeted Welch, the former CEO of General Electric (GE, Fortune 500).

The unemployment rate fell to 7.8% in September, down from 8.1% a month earlier. The drop was due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' survey of households showing that 873,000 more people had jobs than in the previous month. That was the biggest one-month gain in more than nine years.

Since when is this an "official" metric? Oh, it added nearly one million jobs. The dumbasses gobble this BS up instead of looking at total employment.

The markets don't believe this BS either.

[cosmo20002]

Originally Posted by Stewie

Since when is this an "official" metric? Oh, it added nearly one million jobs. The dumbasses gobble this BS up instead of looking at total employment.

1940

[cosmo20002]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...s=rss_business


September jobs report: Where do these numbers come from?
Posted by Dylan Matthews on October 5, 2012 at 12:40 pm

The September jobs report is already spurring a number of conspiracy theories, alleging that the numbers have been tampered with for political gain. Ezra has dispatched with those quite nicely. But it raises a broader question. How does the Bureau of Labor Statistics derive these numbers? How accurate is that process? And how susceptible is it to tampering?

The jobs report actually compiles the results of two different surveys: the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is commonly dubbed the “household survey,” and Current Economic Statistics (CES), or the “employer survey.” The household survey produces the unemployment rate, and the employer survey produces the “nonfarm payrolls” number, which is the most common measure of jobs gained.

Household survey

The CPS is a monthly survey of households that asks which people in the household have worked (or were temporarily absent) in the past week; which have actively looked for work in the past month but did not work; and which neither looked for work nor worked. It’s jointly run by BLS and the Census Bureau and has been conducted since 1940.

The number of people who either worked or looked for work is defined as the “labor force”. The CPS calculates both the “labor force participation rate” — which is the fraction of people over 16 and not in prison who are in the labor force — and the “unemployment rate”, which is the percentage of the labor force not working.

It also calculates a number of “alternative” unemployment measures by asking if members of the household have concluded that no work is available (the “U-4″ measure), have given up looking for work but would still like a job (the “U-5″ measure), or are working part-time but would like to be working full-time (the “U-6″ measure). These tend to be higher than the regular unemployment rate. This month, U-6 was unchanged because a lot of the job gains came in part-time work, but all the others went down.

BLS also asks if members of the household lost their jobs in the month in question, and if they’ve been unemployed more than 15 weeks. Both of these measures went down last month, which is another sign that the labor market is recovering.

The CPS sample includes about 66,000 households. Every month, 25 percent of the sample is changed, so that the sample is not just studying the same group of people. The response rate is very high – usually more than 90 percent. By contrast, opinion polls have a response rate of around 9 percent, and contain samples a fraction of that size.

But even still, there is a lot of room for error. This is most apparent when the BLS releases “revisions” to the data, which showed the initial numbers to be off by almost 400,000 last year. The BLS estimates that the standard error for the unemployment rate is 0.1 points. That means that the margin of error, like that you’d use for polls, is about 0.196 points:


It’s higher for changes in the unemployment rate – the standard error is 0.12, so the margin of error is around 0.2352. But the drop in unemployment last month was 0.3 points – so outside the margin of error, and statistically significant. As former Labor Department economist Betsy Stevenson explains, that’s a clear improvement.

Employer survey

What about the CES? That surveys 141,000 employers, both private and public, at 486,000 worksites and asks for the number of employees, hours worked, and earnings. “Employees” includes both part-time and full-time labor, and is a snapshot taken at the twelfth of the month. “Employment is the total number of persons on establishment payrolls employed full-or part-time who received pay for any part of the pay period that includes the 12th day of the month,” BLS explains. It excludes the self-employed, volunteers, farm workers, and domestic workers. But it includes workers who are on strike, and those working for two different businesses are double-counted.

The standard error for CES is enormous - 55,254 for monthly change. That means the margin of error (at a 95 percent confidence level) is 108,293 – nearly the total number of jobs gained last month. So this month’s job gain was statistically different from zero, but many past ones were not:


What’s this about the seasons?

Both the CPS and the CES use a process called “seasonal adjustment.” They figure that employment usually follows certain seasonal patterns. Construction workers don’t work in the winter, high school and college graduates get hired in the spring, teachers get laid off for the summer, etc. They then adjust the number of employed and unemployed people by what you’d expect to change due to seasonal factors.

As Brad has noted, there’s some evidence that the adjustment formula has gone awry, as there is a wide divergence in the summer and winter jobs numbers, with the latter usually stronger, as you can see in the above figure.

How secure is it?

As my colleague Eli Saslow notes, the BLS process is highly confidential. Economists are put on an eight-day security lockdown in advance of the report, signing confidentiality agreements every morning. The computers they use feature heavy encryption, and data is placed in a safe even for bathroom breaks. The Wednesday before the release, the CPS data comes in, followed by the CES data a few days after.

On the day before the release, three copies of the report and a CD-ROM are placed in a safe and taken to downtown Washington from the secure location where they were prepared, and presented to the few White House officials who have permission for a sneak peek at the numbers. Journalists are given access to the information 30 minutes before release but have to connect to a secure network that prevents them from sending out the data ahead of its official release.

As nonpartisan as government gets

The BLS is a highly nonpartisan operation, existing since 1884 and headed by Jack Galvin, a career employee who ran the employment and unemployment statistics division from 1998 to 2011, and has held a variety of positions there since 1978. Prior to him, Keith Hall headed the agency from 2008 to 2012, following career positions at the Council of Economic Advisors and the International Trade Commission. It’s normal for BLS commissioners to span administrations and parties. Janet Norwood headed the agency from 1979 to 1991, spanning Carter, Reagan, and Bush I, while her predecessor Julius Shiskin headed it under Nixon, Ford and Carter.

Hall has told the Wall Street Journal that it is “impossible” to alter the numbers for political gain. But that hasn’t stopped some from harboring conspiracy theories about their political manipulation. Former GE chief Jack Welch today tweeted that “these Chicago guys will do anything…can’t debate so change numbers,” implying the Obama administration artificially inflated the figures.

But presidents themselves have worried about the agency in the past. Richard Nixon infamously asked his aide Fred Malek to count the number of Jews working in BLS, based on his delusion that Jewish liberals were trying to sabotage him through bad jobs numbers. Suffice it to say, none of these conspiracy theories — be they anti-semitic or anti-Obama — have any truth to them.

[cosmo20002]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...racy-theories/

September jobs report: Debunking the jobs report conspiracy theories

We’ve hit that moment in the election when people begin to lose their minds. Case in point, within minutes of the jobs report, Twitter filled with Republicans claiming the books were somehow cooked, the numbers aren’t real, etc.

Let’s take a deep breath. Jobs reports are about the economy, not about the election. Confusing the two leads to very bad analysis.

This is a good jobs report in a still-weak economy. The 114,000 jobs we added in September aren’t very impressive. The revisions to the last two months, which added 86,000 jobs to the total, were much more impressive. Those revisions also suggest that September’s jobs could get revised up — or, of course, down. So be careful about reading too much into that number. Still, these are, at best, good, not great, numbers.

The controversy, if it’s worth using that word, is over the unemployment rate, which dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. That’s three-tenths of one percent. That’s what all the fuss is about.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: The data was not, as Jack Welch suggested in a now-infamous tweet, manipulated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is set up to ensure the White House has no ability to influence it. As labor economist Betsey Stevenson wrote, “anyone who thinks that political folks can manipulate the unemployment data are completely ignorant of how the BLS works and how the data are compiled.” Plus, if the White House somehow was manipulating the data, don’t you think they would have made the payroll number look a bit better than 114,000? No one would have batted an eye at 160,000.

The fact is that there’s not much that needs to be explained here. We’ve seen drops like this — and even drops bigger than this — before. Between July and August the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent — two-tenths of one percent. November-December of 2011 also saw a .2 percent drop. November-December of 2010 saw a .4 percent drop. This isn’t some incredible aberration. The fact that the unemployment rate broke under the psychologically important 8 percent line is making this number feel bigger to people than it really is.

The number could, of course, be wrong. The household survey is, well, a survey, which means it’s open to error. But the internals back it up. The number saying they had jobs increased by about 800,000. That seems high, but it’s counting 582,000 who say they got part-time jobs.

There’s precedent for this. As Daniel Indiviglio notes, part-time jobs increased by 579,000 in September 2010 and by 483,000 in September 2011. It might simply be seasonal hiring. You don’t need to resort to ridiculous theories like Democrats across the country suddenly deciding to lie to surveytakers in order to help Obama.

Which leads to another argument: That U6, the broadest measure of labor-market pain, didn’t move, which should make us skeptical of the fact that U3, the normal unemployment rate, did move. That’s just misunderstanding what U6 is.

U6 is not an unemployment measure. It includes part-time workers who want full-time work. So it doesn’t count the increase in part-time work. But every measure of actual unemployment — U1, U2, U3, U4, and U5 — went down. You can see them all here. Again, there’s no mystery.

This is an encouraging report. What it tells us is that the labor market has been a bit better over the last few months than we thought, and that the recovery hasn’t slowed in the ways we feared. What the response to it tells us is that the election is driving people a little bit crazy.

[Stewie]

Originally Posted by cosmo20002

1940

Cool! Whew! I thought we had a problem with numbers.

I don't doubt there are all kinds of household surveys. They are ignored for the most part.

[Stewie]

Originally Posted by cosmo20002

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...racy-theories/

September jobs report: Debunking the jobs report conspiracy theories

We’ve hit that moment in the election when people begin to lose their minds. Case in point, within minutes of the jobs report, Twitter filled with Republicans claiming the books were somehow cooked, the numbers aren’t real, etc.

Let’s take a deep breath. Jobs reports are about the economy, not about the election. Confusing the two leads to very bad analysis.

This is a good jobs report in a still-weak economy. The 114,000 jobs we added in September aren’t very impressive. The revisions to the last two months, which added 86,000 jobs to the total, were much more impressive. Those revisions also suggest that September’s jobs could get revised up — or, of course, down. So be careful about reading too much into that number. Still, these are, at best, good, not great, numbers.

The controversy, if it’s worth using that word, is over the unemployment rate, which dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. That’s three-tenths of one percent. That’s what all the fuss is about.

Let’s get one thing out of the way: The data was not, as Jack Welch suggested in a now-infamous tweet, manipulated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is set up to ensure the White House has no ability to influence it. As labor economist Betsey Stevenson wrote, “anyone who thinks that political folks can manipulate the unemployment data are completely ignorant of how the BLS works and how the data are compiled.” Plus, if the White House somehow was manipulating the data, don’t you think they would have made the payroll number look a bit better than 114,000? No one would have batted an eye at 160,000.

The fact is that there’s not much that needs to be explained here. We’ve seen drops like this — and even drops bigger than this — before. Between July and August the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent — two-tenths of one percent. November-December of 2011 also saw a .2 percent drop. November-December of 2010 saw a .4 percent drop. This isn’t some incredible aberration. The fact that the unemployment rate broke under the psychologically important 8 percent line is making this number feel bigger to people than it really is.

The number could, of course, be wrong. The household survey is, well, a survey, which means it’s open to error. But the internals back it up. The number saying they had jobs increased by about 800,000. That seems high, but it’s counting 582,000 who say they got part-time jobs.

There’s precedent for this. As Daniel Indiviglio notes, part-time jobs increased by 579,000 in September 2010 and by 483,000 in September 2011. It might simply be seasonal hiring. You don’t need to resort to ridiculous theories like Democrats across the country suddenly deciding to lie to surveytakers in order to help Obama.

Which leads to another argument: That U6, the broadest measure of labor-market pain, didn’t move, which should make us skeptical of the fact that U3, the normal unemployment rate, did move. That’s just misunderstanding what U6 is.

U6 is not an unemployment measure. It includes part-time workers who want full-time work. So it doesn’t count the increase in part-time work. But every measure of actual unemployment — U1, U2, U3, U4, and U5 — went down. You can see them all here. Again, there’s no mystery.

This is an encouraging report. What it tells us is that the labor market has been a bit better over the last few months than we thought, and that the recovery hasn’t slowed in the ways we feared. What the response to it tells us is that the election is driving people a little bit crazy.

JFC! The numbers don't need to manipulated. Cooking the books started with Clinton's changes that included hedonics, birth/death, etc.

ShadowStats is your friend.

[suzzer99]

Republican PR machine going full conspiritard on this one. I just wish they'd make up their minds on whether these numbers are fake great numbers, or real numbers that aren't actually that good. Get your talking points aligned guys.

[alpha_omega]

The number is the number (relative to all the other reports that have come before this one).


Fact of the matter is that it is just now down to where it was at the beginning of the presidency. Shouldn't that number have started coming down sometime way before now???????

[jjjayb]

Originally Posted by cosmo20002

IT IS THE SAME PROCEDURE EVERY TIME. But the right doesn't like this month's report, so they come up with reasons it doesn't count. It is one side acting idiotic here.

Going to copy this from elsewhere. It gives a good explanation for where the jobs report comes from, and why these numbers are very suspect and likely to be revised.

The jobs report is made up of two SURVEYS. One of businesses (in which 410,000 businesses report) and a large phone survey of households (in which 60,000 homes are called).

The latter survey is much more volatile than the first. It tends to have lots of noise in it, and big swings. But even so, this big spike is notable for being bigger than recent swings.
It's this last survey that informs the actual unemployment figure. The first number, the payroll survey, tells us the net job creation in a month.

Now, according to the household survey, 873,000 jobs were created last month. Very close to one million jobs. That's not unprecedented; it happened last in 1983.

Only thing is, when that happened in 1983, that was in the first blast of the Reagan boom, and the country's Gross Domestic Product was growing at a blistering 9.3% rate.

Current rate of GDP growth? Something like 1.3%.

Jumps almost as big as this one (but not quite) have happened when the GDP growth rate was 5% or so.

But at the 1.3% level? At this level of economic growth -- not even enough to keep up with population growth-- what exactly would be driving the employment train?

If anyone's too young too know, let me explain to you what a 1983 economy feels like: It feels like the movie Wall Street. As Adam Carolla says, "pre-AIDS, mid-coke." Poppy music on the Blaupunkt. People buy plastic watches to wear on their ankles and in their hair. The world is your Cinnabon's.

It's the kind of economy where you sort of have some leverage with your boss because the economy's so hot that labor is a seller's, not buyer's market.

Not just for good jobs. For crap jobs too. A sizzling economy makes a lot of crap jobs. So you can quit your job and have a pretty good idea you'll have a new one in a couple of weeks.

Is that the way the third quarter of 2012 feels to people?

So. You can buy that this number is real, and we all just missed the signs of a 9.3% growth spurt, or you can wonder if maybe this isn't just an "implausible statistical quirk," as one analyst calls it. Every poll -- and that's what the household survey is, a big poll -- is subject for the occasional outside-the-MoE error.

You don't even have to think Obama cooked the books (though Jay Cost reminds that that does happen) to look at the number with suspicion.

The economy simply did not add 873,000 jobs last month. It simply did not. The payroll survey says it added a mere 114,000.

There is absolutely no confirmatory data suggesting that the 873,000 number is right and the 114,000 number is wrong. As one guy asked on Twitter -- did payroll taxes jump up past month?

It's either a lucky outlier for Obama -- or luck had nothing to do with it -- but it doesn't represent current economic conditions.

If Obama and Solis really believed the economy grew 873,000 jobs, why aren't they celebrating that? Why aren't they bragging about it? Why aren't they doubting the 114,000 figure, and noting the 700,000 in undercounted jobs they should be getting credit for?

[J Diddy]

Originally Posted by alpha_omega

The number is the number (relative to all the other reports that have come before this one).


Fact of the matter is that it is just now down to where it was at the beginning of the presidency. Shouldn't that number have started coming down sometime way before now???????

It was no small hole to dig out of. Fact of the matter is that the economy is coming back and jobs are too. That proves that his policies are working.