Economy rise unheeded

[CShine]

WASHINGTON -- The economy gained 1.2 million jobs in the last six months, a potential political boon for President George W. Bush, but a development barely noticed by Lonnie Steele and hundreds of other voters surveyed by The Associated Press.

"I don't think he's created anything," said Steele, 57, an undecided voter from East Flat Rock, N.C. "I know a number of people who are educated people, and they are working two or three minimum-wage jobs just trying to put groceries on the table and keep their families alive."

Steele is not alone. Voters are too focused on the war in Iraq and other news -- and too busy trying to make ends meet -- to heed the upbeat economic news from the Bush administration. Few voters seem to be giving Bush credit for the new jobs or other signs of financial recovery. An Associated Press survey of 788 registered voters conducted Monday through Wednesday showed that while they may be gaining confidence in the economy and Bush's performance, 57 percent said the nation has lost jobs in the last six months. The Labor Department has reported just the opposite -- nearly 1.2 million jobs gained in half a year.

"The message hasn't gotten out," said Andy Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "It takes a while for national changes to get down to the people level."

The Nov. 2 election may hinge on whether the economy continues to improve and voters notice. The race is a dead heat, with Bush at 46 percent, Democrat John Kerry at 45 percent and independent candidate Ralph Nader at 6 percent, according to the AP poll conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs.

http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20950~2207905,00.html

[shraby]

1. Voters probably don't notice

the increase in jobs because they are still unemployed or are employed but working 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet. Our town is losing 160 jobs to Mexico real soon, and I would guess in another year the whole plant will move and we'll lose over a thousand more jobs. This is a plant that has been here since the late 1800s.

[Eric J in MN]

2. The job numbers are fake, and I'm glad

The job numbers are fake, and I'm glad people aren't buying them.

The Bush Administration invented a new element to the calculation called the "CES Net Birth/Death Model." This was supposed to be a small adjustment but it was 94% of their April 2004 job figure.


For more info, go here:

http://www.moveleft.com/moveleft_essay_2004_06_07_fake_job_numbers_from_the_bush_administration.asp

[Warpy]

7. Even the New York Post (Murdoch rag) ran this story

They pointed out that the numbers are fictional, produced by a formula of what jobs "should" be created, rather than any tally of what jobs ARE being created. It's just more Enron funny numbers coming out of DC, like that "no inflation" crap anybody who buys food or gasoline knows is a dirty lie.

At some point, this avalanche of lying is going to come crashing down on our fearless leaders and bury them forever. It will take a very long time after that to build up any trust at all with the US public, and that is very sad.

[wryter2000]

8. When did they start using this model?

Did I read it right, that they started using this birth/death model in April 2003? It would be interesting to see if the jobs gained numbers changed significantly around that time.

[Eric J in MN]

13. yes, April 2003, and I realize the obvious question is, why

Yes, April 2003, and I realize the obvious question is, why did it take a year for the new calculation to produce a big jobs figure.

One possibility is that the Labor Dept. was shy about attributing hundreds of thousands of jobs to the new element in the calculation they promised would be "small," but with the election-approaching, they started fudging to help Bush.

The numbers cannot be independently verified using the information on their website.

I don't know whether an Economics Professor who contacted the Labor Dept. would be provided enough information to independently verify them.

If anyone reading this knows an Economics Professor or has a degree in Economics, please PM me and we can discuss this issue.

[wryter2000]

16. What I thought was...

Maybe the numbers back in April - December 2003 were still negative and they could only show moderately positive numbers by cooking the books. The only large "gains" have been in the last three months. January and February were very weak. One month was 21K, if I recall, even using their new formula.

I searched but couldn't find job losses/gains numbers going back at all. That website isn't easy to use.

On edit: I'm pretty sure we have an econ prof here. Maybe ProfessorGAC, I'm not sure.

[mulethree]

19. link - Most of Those New Jobs Reported Are Imaginary

http://rtorgerson.blogspot.com/2004/06/most-of-those-new-jobs-reported-are.html

"
Most of Those New Jobs Reported Are Imaginary
John Crudele's jobs commentary in the New York Post caght my eye last month. He reported that a huge number of the new jobs being reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics were actually the imaginary invention of a statistical method known as "birth/death modeling". This model attempts to correct the notion that the employment figures don't account for jobs created by new businesses that haven't reported in to state Unemployment Insurance agencies yet. So long term studies showed that the rate of dying business was very similar to the rate of new businesses formed - on average, over the business cycle. So, the birth/death model imputes a number for new businesses based upon the number of old businesses that died that month. (If population rates were calculated this way, we would 'discover ' that, among other things, fatal traffic accidents cause babies.)

Intrigued, I looked closer. To their credit, the BLS publishes their entire methodology online. All you have to do is wade through explanations of statistical number crunching as described by Washington bureaucrats. What I found suggests that Crudele may have been understating the problem. When you actually reproduce the BLS methodology described in the BLS Handbook of Methods (Chapter 2), you arrive at the conclusion that fully 88% of the new jobs claimed to have been created since March 2003 are imaginary.

To arrive at a monthly estimate of nonfarm payrolls, the BLS creates a benchmark universe of jobs through compiling Unemployment Insurance records from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This benchmark is updated each year, about eleven months after the fact. The latest benchmark data is March 2003, which was compiled in February 2004. Then, each month the BLS takes a random sample of the universe and counts the jobs found within. They then compare that figure with the corresponding figure from the prior month's sample. So if the latest month's sample found 26,000 jobs, and last month's found 25,000, then the conclusion is made that the job market grew 4%. They then multiply that percentage growth against last month's estimate of total jobs. But that's not where it stops. They then arbitrarily add a figure for jobs created by new businesses they imagine were created, based on the number of businesses went dead that month (which are signified by the number of businesses in the sample that either reported 0 employees or didn't report at all.) The assumption here is that a dead business in the sample automatically means another business was created that month that hadn't gotten around to report to the state unemployment insurance agencies. Of course this doesn't account for all those businesses who laid off their employees because their jobs were outsourced to India, but I'm sure that's not a problem. Right.

The insidious thing about this is that these imaginary numbers appear to be cumulative. That is, if BLS imagined that 1,000 jobs were created in one month by businesses they can't see, then that 1,000 gets added to next month's total as well. Here's the formula:
"
- more -

Look at the comments at the bottom, one implies that the use of seasonally adjusted numbers threw these calculations off and the real figure is about 40% of the new jobs came from the new birth/death calculations instead of the 88% stated in the article.

[Kahuna]

3. Ironic. Bush wanted the "war" to take voters minds off of the economy."

Well it did! He should be very happy.

[Hoping4Change]

4. Deceiving. A huge chunk of new jobs are gov't jobs

and another huge chunk are part-time, seasonal in other words crappy, low pay jobs, with no benefits.

[Dover]

5. The "message" isn't believed. Who WOULD believe this misAdministration?

They have proven themselves alright....proven that they will manipulate, lie, cheat, steal and kill to retain power.

[KoKo]

6. What they left out is that we out here KNOW what's going on and that

Bush's figures about our economy are lies. Employment is service and partime jobs, we are the biggest debtor nation in the world, Japan and China own our debt, the stock market is held up with Saudi and other money that isn't just our 401-k's.

Going to the grocery store and filling our car with gas to get to work is more expensive, if you can afford some health care you're paying more for it, doctors and dentists are raising their costs while people are not getting raises to reflect the inflation that's out there. People are refinancing their houses to stay afloat and the government says this is "wealth creation."

This is what's sinking in. "You can fool some of the people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time." After awhile people don't believe what they are told when their own experiences tell them otherwise. Are we safer today? No! How many lies will people accept before they rise up?

[mhr]

9. Unemployed 4 Years Here - 2000+ Resumes Out The Door - Nada!

eom

[makhno]

10. It all makes sense

Look at what the guy in the article says - someone loses one stable, well-paying job and goes on to gain not one, but two or even three jobs! Shitty ones, admittedly, but, hey, it doesn't say whether it's 1.2 million at $25/hr or at subsistence wages.

That's one booming "service" economy for sure. With the proletariat servicing the rich on its hands and knees.

[struggle4progress]

11. dupe

essentially same story posted under variant headline at

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=616773

[leftofthedial]

12. the job numbers are phony

like Orwellian chocolate rations

and jobs that have been created are lower paying jobs than were the millions of jobs lost.

I work four part-time jobs now and make less than my old full-time job. I spent about a year since Faceplant and the bushgang seized power with no income at all.

I don't feel better about the economy because a GOP propaganda outlet tells me about all the jobs that have been created somewhere else.

[Eric J in MN]

14. Notice the disconnect betweent the word of the citizen and

Notice the disconnect between the word of the ordinary citizen and the words of the journalist.

The ordinary citizen says, "I don't think he's created anything."

And the journalist says that voters are "too busy trying to make ends meet -- to heed the upbeat economic news."

The person quoted isn't TOO BUSY to respond. He doesn't believe the statistics from the Bush Admin.

[teryang]

15. Initial jobless claims rise to 7 week high-CBS

http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/newsfinder/pulseone.asp?guid={9BBD121B-5882-4AFF-8440-50C78ABAAE5C}&siteid=mktw&dist=bnb

<U.S. initial jobless claims rise to 6-week high By Rex Nutting
WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) - The average number of workers filing for initial state unemployment claims over the past four weeks rose by 4,750 to a six-week high of 346,000 last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Initial claims in the most recent week rose by 12,000 to 352,000, a seven-week high, the agency said. Economists were predicting a drop to about 336,000. Meanwhile, the number of Americans continuing to receive unemployment checks fell by 106,000 in the week ending May 29 to 2.88 million, the lowest in three years. It's the largest decline in continuing claims since the first week of the year. The insured unemployment rate dropped to 2.3 percent from 2.4 percent.>

I've been unemployed for 6 months and recently lost my benefits on a legal technicality. I have two licenses and a professional degree.

[union_maid]

17. They're doing everything they can to sell the idea of this great economy

I think it's a huge mistake. Telling people that things are good when they're not is just another thing that'll blow up in their faces. If you had a situation where most people were doing well but a tiny slice of the population was sinking you could sweep that under the rug. If this recovery remains free of good jobs that provide a decent standard of living there's no way to sweep that under the rug. People know and they just get madder when you tell them it's all rosy.

[Red Fox]

18. Wrong on both accounts essentially

Bush Administration's tax cuts not fulfilling job creation promises
The Bush Administration called the tax cut package, which was passed in May 2003 and took effect in July 2003, its "Jobs and Growth Plan." The president's economics staff, the Council of Economic Advisers (see background documents), projected that the plan would result in the creation of 5.5 million jobs by the end of 2004—306,000 new jobs each month, starting in July 2003. The CEA projected that, starting in July 2003, the economy would generate 228,000 jobs a month without a tax cut and 306,000 jobs a month with the tax cut. Thus, it projected that 3,366,000 would be created in the last 11 months. In fact, since the tax cuts took effect, jobs have grown by 1,365,000—two million fewer jobs than the administration projected would be created by enactment of its tax cuts.

www.jobwatch.org