Just as Rush predicted a year ago...
It doesn't look like anyone in the know is buying the administration's bogus numbers either...
Ed Morrissey at HotAir riffles through all of this, and concludes a couple of things...
Bloomberg’s Alex Kowalski has an explanation that covers most of the confusion:
"The household survey showed an 873,000 increase in employment, the biggest since June 1983, excluding the annual Census population adjustments. Some 582,000 Americans took part- time positions because of slack business conditions or those jobs were the only work they could find."
So, the Obama administration is asking us to just accept that in this unrecovered economy, an influx of part-time jobs has miraculously improved the nation's anemic unemployment situation by leaps and bounds...all you gotta do is believe our numbers. I, like the rest, have gotta call BS!
The numbers still don’t add up to Morrissey either, pointing to both the household data and the fact that the U-6 unemployment rate (which captures unemployment and underemployment as well as the marginally attached) is still at 14.7%...it hasn't budged...and it hasn’t been below 14% in years.
James Pethokoukis further explores the oddities, as well as pointing to the U-6 rate...
AEI: Only in an era of depressingly diminished expectations could the September jobs report be called a good one. It really isn’t. Not at all.
1. Yes, the U-3 unemployment rate fell to 7.8%, the first time it has been below 8% since January 2009. But that’s only due to a flood of 582,000 part-time jobs. As the Labor Department noted:
“The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons (sometimes referred to as involuntary part-time workers) rose from 8.0 million in August to 8.6 million in September. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.”
2. And take-home pay? Over the past 12 months, average hourly earnings have risen by just 1.8 percent. When you take inflation into account, wages are flat to down.
3. The broader U-6 rate — which takes into account part-time workers who want full-time work and lots of discouraged workers who’ve given up looking — stayed unchanged at 14.7%. That’s a better gauge of the true unemployment rate and state of the American labor market.
TheBlaze bullet-pointed the oddities...
•Unemployment drops to 44-month low to 7.8%
•However, many are questioning the numbers due to “contradictory data points” such as the total unemployment level soaring but the low net number
•Government says 873K people found work — but reports only 114K new jobs were added
•Former GE CEO alleged fraud, sending a tweet saying “these Chicago guys will do anything”
•Popular finance blog Zero Hedge even called it a “preelection ‘massaging’ farce”
...before pointing to skepticism, running the gambit from FoxBusiness to...brace yourself...MSNBC!
Finally, we get another piece of the puzzle: the highly suspect Employer survey...
BeltwayConfidential: ...there is still a huge 756,000 job gap between the number of jobs employers told the Labor Department they created in September (114k), and the number of Americans who told the labor department that they got new jobs (873k). As the chart below shows, these two numbers never match up perfectly, but this month’s gap, particularly the spike in Americans saying they found jobs, is striking:
While you normally hear the Employer survey number in headlines, it actually has nothing to do with the unemployment rate that also gets reported. The Household survey controls that. And the driving reason the unemployment rate fell from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September, is because BLS claims almost one million Americans found jobs last month.
A million new jobs in a month? Does that sound anything like the economy you and your neighbors are living in?
Personally, I think Jack Welch's quote and Rush's year old prediction that I started this post with explains everything with more clarity than any of the graphs and statistics are capable of.
Ultimately, the question boils down to this: Will Americans swallow this sham only a month away from the election? The answer to that should be common sense...but then again, look who the masses voted into the Oval Office four years ago.
