AP Plays Fast and Loose with Jobless Numbers
Even casual followers of news about the U.S. labor market during the past five months “know” that the economy has lost a lot of jobs.
Those who have read or heard excerpts or snippets from dispatches written by the Associated Press’s Jeannine Aversa during that time (chances are good that they have, because of the wide distribution of AP’s reporting) also “know” that employers have been “slashing” jobs and handing out stacks of “pink slips.”
February’s Employment Situation Report (ESR) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that the economy had lost 63,000 jobs inspired Aversa (bolds are mine throughout this column) to write that:
Dangerous cracks in the nation’s job market are deepening. Employers slashed jobs by the largest amount in five years …
After the March ESR, Aversa told us that:
Workers’ pink slips stacked ever higher in March as jittery employers slashed 80,000 jobs …
When the April ESR initially showed a lower-than-expected 20,000 jobs lost, Aversa wrote:
Businesses are handing out pink slips as they cope with an economy that is teetering on the edge of a recession, or possibly in one already.
For May’s ESR, which showed another 49,000 jobs lost, she switched her focus to the unemployment rate:
Pink slips piled up and jobs disappeared into thin air in May as the nation’s unemployment rate zoomed to 5.5 percent in the biggest one-month jump in decades.
… Help-wanted signs are vanishing along with jobs …
After yet another reported reduction in June, this time by 62,000 jobs, Aversa reached the peak of her 2008 histrionics:
… [There is] a storm of pink slips drenching this year’s July Fourth holiday for more than 60,000 Americans … leaving thousands more worried about the future.
Indeed, there’s no denying that from February through June (after subsequent revisions), the BLS has reported that the economy lost 362,000 jobs:
That’s not good at all. But you would think from Aversa’s accumulated five months of overheated reporting that bodies of the hapless, helpless unemployed are strewn everywhere.
Clearly, that’s not the case. But why is that?
What if I told you that Aversa’s “slashing” and “pink slip” assertions are not only exaggerated, but false?
BLS, in the left box below, estimates that the economy actually added 2,712,000 jobs from February through June:
How can that be? Here’s how.
This is a shameless equivalent of push polling, designed to wire the election. I suppose that that is what ‘wire services’ do today.
Nice piece Tom. Government statistics — unemployment, CPI, GDP — and the entire alphabet soup of government stats are useful when presented accurately. As you have demonstrated, the narrative of doom and gloom at the AP seems to have overwhelmed the true facts on the ground.
Everyone knows that government’s inflation and jobless reports are significantly doctored to the lower side. Why don’t you look at jobless rate in governemt versus private sector – government (unproductive, debt-paid) jobs GROW every month, productive jobs decline every month. This fact makes the jobless picture look much rosier than it actually is.
What jobs can we expect in a country with no manufacturing base, living on imported resources, imported manufactured goods and also fighting enormously expensive and completely unpopular/unproductive wars. We live only on debt, That debt is hitting the ceiling and there is no more room left –
9.6 TRILLION of Government Debt
12 TRILLION Corporate Debt (not including financial sector)
15 TRILLION Financial Sector Debt – banks are supposed to be lenders not borrowers???
Adjust away…
Employment numbers are totally bogus anyway. Take a look at who the government considers employed then try and explain the numbers in a rational way. It can’t be done.
I agree, the government does seem to find a way to skew the numbers. Of course, any bureaucrat will find a way to justify their existence even if the position in their self-created bureaucracy is not productive. However, I can speak personally of the decline in the job market for those once employed in the mortgage sector.