It Usually Is

Friday’s jobs report was worse than I thought. Let’s go to Mort Zuckerman for the numbers behind the numbers:

Washington, Wall Street, and the business world were astounded and dismayed by the dismal employment statistics recently put forth by the government. We need 125,000 jobs every month just to account for people entering the workforce, but the numbers show only 18,000 more jobs in June and 25,000 in May. And the June numbers included the assumption that 131,000 net jobs were created by newly formed companies, a generous assumption that has proved to be consistently overstated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the past three years. [Emphasis added]

Yesterday, BLS reported that it had revised June’s meager gains up — a nice change. And apparently they did so by assuming 131,000 jobs. And we all know what happens when one assumes. But — and this is the part that will really steam your cheese — BLS had to assume those 131,000 jobs to get to a revised total of 18,000. Actually, there were fewer people working, part-time or full-time, in June than there were in May.

So what was the real unemployment rate in June? Was it 9.2%, as previously reported? Higher? Lower? Nobody knows, because BLS is just making stuff up. Drop the “L” out of the acronym and you’d have a more accurate label — and that’s no assumption.

But enough bad news. Let’s get to the really bad news. This next bit will make you cry:

Almost ignored by the press is the fact that full-time employment dropped by 435,000 in the last month and, over the past three months, it is down by a combined total of 868,000 jobs. There has been a 3 percent increase in the number of people working part time, but full-time employment has been down 0.5 percent for the full year. In fact, all of the net job increases since President Obama came into office were part-time employees and not full-time employees, a critical distinction.

Barack Obama — the Part-Time President.

Help me make that label stick, won’t you?