The job numbers were NOT good.
By Daniel at 5 December, 2009, 3:53 pm
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I don’t believe it is a coincidence that Obama’s “job summit” and these rosy numbers coincided with each other.
Not to mention that seasonal temp. employment was boosted pre-holiday to make up for all the full time workers fired to increase quarterly profits.
You don’t have to pay part-time temps. overtime or benefits and you can fire them unceremoniously come the second week of January - after the Christmas gift returns slacken.
I’ll believe statistics like this when they continue through Spring. Otherwise, it appears to be some data fudging for political candy - and ignoring the usual temp. worker spike leading up to the holidays and the end of the quarter.
What changed to make them ‘appear’ good was the terrible statistic that 291,000 are ‘no longer in the labor force’. They reduced the number of unemployed by dropping them from the count.
Simple math:
You have a hundred people in the total workforce and 10 of them are unemployed. Thus your unemployment rate is 10%.
If 1 of the unemployed gives up looking for a job and is no longer counted. 1 of the employed gets laid off and decides to retire, go back to school, etc. and is no longer counted.
Your unemployment rate has dropped to 8.82%. You merely removed a larger percentage of unemployed from your total population not reduced the number of unemployed. Though on the surface the situation appears to have improved, it actually got worse. This situation is easily counted by the continued loss of payroll taxes. The number of payroll taxes filed by employers continues to drop. Frankly, I would love to see the total number from the government over time. This would give us a much clearer picture instead of the ’survey’ used.
- ebworthen
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