After the release of Friday’s employment report showing that the nation’s unemployment rate had dropped below 8% in September for the first time in 44 months, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis appeared on CNBC, claiming to feel “insulted” by those who believe that its numbers were conveniently cooked for President Obama’s electoral advantage. She further asserted: “We have a very professional civil service organization (with) … top economists. … These are — these are our best-trained and best-skilled individuals.”
With the exception of at least two economists who have donated to political campaigns (but who don’t appear to have been in positions to influence the numbers), Solis appears to be mostly right about the professionalism at her department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those who toil there should feel insulted at how Solis and whoever else is responsible chose to present the information in September’s Employment Situation Summary.
The primary bone of contention is the September increase of 873,000, according to the BLS’s Household Survey (based on interviews and surveys of heads of households), in the number of people employed. That figure made it into the summary’s narrative, and was explained as follows:
Total employment rose by 873,000 in September, following 3 months of little change.
This was a brazen attempt to make a wildly fluctuating and relatively unimportant figure in a survey where the primary mission is to estimate the percentage of people who are not employed seem more important than the mediocre seasonally adjusted September job additions of 114,000 in the Establishment Survey of employers. I reviewed this year’s first eight Employment Situation Summaries; the Household Survey’s specific employment pickup or loss was never mentioned in any of them.
One could argue that the September increase was too big to ignore and had to be cited to address inevitable questions. If so, then the report should have noted the figure’s historically wild fluctuations and relative insignificance instead of blandly telling readers about three previous months of alleged “little change” — an assertion which was itself quite deceptive, especially when comparing the Household Survey’s results for the past seven months to the Establishment Survey:
While the Establishment Survey has been showing job growth plodding along at a mostly tepid pace, adding an average of 111,000 jobs a month during the past seven months, the Household Survey’s total employment figure has seen month-to-month differences varying from the Establishment Survey by several hundred thousand in both directions. That’s hardly “little change,” Hilda.
Of course, the press couldn’t resist reporting the highly unreliable figure. It made it into the second paragraph at the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press, while the Establishment Survey result got mentioned in paragraph 3. The New York Times saved the Household Survey’s 873,000 employment growth figure for a later paragraph, but implausibly claimed that “its credibility was bolstered by an unexpectedly robust rise in consumer confidence.” The confidence reference was to a Gallup poll which, as the Times acknowledged, attributed its rise “almost entirely to increased optimism among Democrats.” In other words, confidence is up because many Obama supporters recognize a duty to say that they’re confident even if they’re not.
To the AP’s credit, it noticed, though not until the 24th paragraph of its report, that most of the Household Survey’s employment pickup was in an unimpressive area: “582,000 more people reported that they were working part-time last month but wanted full-time jobs … the biggest increase in so-called underemployed Americans since February 2009.” This is exactly the kind of result Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney was thinking of when he said on Friday: “This is not what a real recovery looks like.”
We haven’t seen what a real recovery looks like since the recession as officially defined ended 39 long months ago. Despite September’s unemployment rate drop:
- That rate has been 7.8% or higher during every single month of Obama’s term, something not seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal extended the Great Depression for eight dreadful years.
- During Obama’s first and hopefully sole presidential term, seasonally adjusted full-time employment reported in the Household Survey has contracted — by 604,000 through September. Meanwhile, part-time employment has ballooned by over 1.5 million.
- In the Establishment Survey, even after considering a pending and preliminary adjustment to total employment of an estimated 386,000 for the 12 months ended in March, the nation’s economy has only added 325,000 jobs since Obama took office. The increase in the number of jobs at temporary help services during that time (570,000 before the pending adjustment) has been far greater.
- In the “What have you done for us lately?” department, seasonally adjusted job growth per the Establishment Survey has averaged only 106,000 per month during the past six months, while monthly private-sector job additions in August and September averaged only 100,000.
- Meanwhile, the Household Survey tells us that every single job added and then some during the past six months (819,000) has been part-time, while full-time employment has dropped by 64,000. Taxmageddon and ObamaCare are already exacting a heavy price.
As to the conspiracy theories, to believe them you’d have to buy into the idea that the BLS’s compilers deliberately showed the contractions seen above in Household Survey employment in July and August, allowing President Obama to continue to get hammered during all of August and September over his administration’s then-unbroken streak of 43 months of 8%-plus unemployment, and then opened the floodgates on October 5, just 32 days before the election — after the travesty of early voting has already begun in some states — to finally get the rate below 8%. Really?
That said, it’s hard to totally blame those who see a conspiracy, simply because this administration, by far the most callously and pervasively dishonest in my lifetime, has given critics so much fodder in so many other areas. To name just a few:
- Its lethal, reality-denying decision-making in Libya and the Middle East, leading it to ramp down and deny adequate security protection to Americans in dangerous situations when it clearly should have been increased.
- Its craven yet still unadmitted willingness to flood Mexico with guns which could only be “traced” after their murderous use.
- Its open political favoritism in “green jobs”-related loans and grants.
- Finally, in a brazen repeat of what occurred during the 2008 presidential campaign, the president’s campaign has again “chosen not to use AVS (Address Verification System) in screening contributions made by credit card,” potentially (i.e., more than likely) “accepting contributions from phony names or accepting contributions from foreigners, both of which are illegal.”
This horror show on virtually all fronts can’t end soon enough.
More: Tea Party Congresswoman: Labor Stats Speak for Themselves, Cooked or Not
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