Note: Next Month’s job numbers come out November 2nd. They will the last significant report prior to the election.

Many of the significant economic reports have been outsourced by the government to private firms. There needs to be an investigation into this, and if the numbers have been manipulated the responsibility for the employment reports needs to be outsourced. Gallup does an employment survey and found September seasonally adjusted unemployment to be unchanged. This is why we can’t have nice things.

This wouldn’t matter if the person listening to AP on the half hour radio news would report skepticism about the numbers or would report the contradiction of the numbers.
This wouldn’t matter if an audience member tuning in to ABC, NBC, or CBS today would hear the anchor state, “The numbers don’t make sense to economists trying to understand them” and then if the audience member would actually hear interviews with those people.
So, since that won’t happen, the greater question is, how do R&R explain the numbers to their audience.
One possibility is that this week Paul Ryan will be able to put the really bad news in those numbers into perspective. The only problem is that the audience for the VP debate will not be huge.

Josh made good points. The household survey has inherent flaws, and while it usually tracks with the payroll numbers, this one could easily be an outlier – a casualty of the margin of error. I can’t imagine they cooked the numbers, but as noted above, it’s funny how the anomalies always lower the U3 number – the only thing the average voter pays attention to.

There is no good news in this report? America is healing from George Bush, we are creating jobs. And to you that is a bad thing? Or is it just that anything that makes Obama look good is automatically a bad thing? If every job in America was filled tomorrow, conservatives would find a reason to complain about it.

Gee, the hack Hilda Solis has NO influence on anything? Gee, data dependent on surveys cannot be tainted? Seasonal adjustments can’t be tainted? U3 is hardly a science. Look at the surrounding facts. How in heck can we have record food stamp usage and have improving UE rate? There are political hacks in all levels of government. There doesn’t have to be some grand conspiracy like JournoList, but rather sympathetic like minded people.

Well done Mr. Horowitz. This is the best analysis of the numbers I have seen so far.

Just heard Romney sound bite at a rally where he states unemployment would be at 11 per cent if the same number of people were in the work force now as there were on the day Obama was inaugurated. He needs to be relentless in hammering this home to the American public. Surprised the sound bite was played on ABC Radio top of the hour news….although they did trumpet this dubious 7.8 per cent figure first.

“America is healing from George Bush, we are creating jobs.”

Do you really think people buy this idiotic excuse making? We are creating jobs at such a slow rate we will not close the ‘jobs deficit’ of the last recession until 2020. This is the worst ‘recovery’ since WWII.

Bush inherited the burst internet bubble in 2001 and I dont recall a single time when Bush in 2004 blamed any economic weakness on the recession he inherited.

Why stop with GWB? if you are going to go back… America is healing from the LBJ Presidency… no, wait, we are still healing from FDR, … nope, It’s all on Grover Cleveland!

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82050.html

I’m very confused about seasonal adjustments. According to this article, the jobs numbers for September and October are expected to benefit the President because of hiring for the holidays. Are they saying that the government routinely underestimates the number of seasonal workers?

We need to have a punchier way to say the same thing. People think that 7.8% unemployment means that 7.8% of Americans who WANT work are unemployed. The real number, as above, is 11% or so. Let’s just say it: “11% of Americans who want to work are not working. When Obama took office, X million people were working and Y million were unemployed. Today, 186 million are working and 23 million are unemployed; that’s 11%, not 7.8%. Making it worse, average household income has dropped $4500 per year in the same time period.”

I don’t know what X and Y are, but the Romney campaign should know. If they don’t they could ask Newt.

Missing the point. The work force increase by 418K. This was not a shift from full-time to part-time employees. Where these people hired for Halloween or Christmas?

The real structural problem with the Economy as a whole is GDP growth. Over the last 8 quarters it has hit 3% only once. The last 4 quarters have been 1.8, 3.0, 2.0, and 1.3. Three percent is treading water or about break even. We need growth for Jobs as well as revenue for the Treasury. Putting just the Energy Sector back to work with the Romney plan would increase growth across the board. This Administration through both policy and regulation stifle growth not to mention the Uncertainty caused by ObamaCare as well as the Fiscal Cliff.

According to Ace of Spades, the economy would have had to have created 873K jobs last month to drop U3 all the way to 7.8%. This happened before in 1983. The Quarterly GDP when that happened was at an annualized rate of 9.3%. This quarter’s GDP is at 1.3%. The question Mr. Logic should ask is whether a GDP growing at a 1.3% annualized rate could really create 873K jobs? If not, this is statistical voodoo.

Yes. It’s hard to say whether Obamacare was actually designed this way, as a redistribution mechanism, or whether it is just a consequence of how the legislation was designed. I don’t know the answer to that one.

Either way, part-time employment could become the new “norm” under Obama. This is a point that hasn’t drawn much attention as of yet.

The disparity in the numbers is easy to explain:
114,000 new jobs created
600,000 new vacation planners for the president

I’m a little confused (seems reasonable to say, given the nature of these #’s). If participation rate increased with employment rate, does that mean jobs were ACTUALLY created (even if they are part-time/not the best paying)???

Second, is the author saying that numbers were intentionally fixed?? If so, serious consequences should be imposed. It would be criminal to think that Obama gets a boost for finally clearing the 8% unemployment rate because someone misrepresented the truth.

Don’t know why the U-6 number is not explained by the Romney camp- it’s not that difficult for the public to understand: those collecting unemployment, those whose benefits have run out and have given up, and those who want full-time work but can only get part-time jobs. That number is at 14 per cent- and it’s been unchanged for two years! One out of seven of our friends and neighbors can’t even get a full-time gig in Obama’s America? And it’s not improving at all and the President is taking a victory lap today?

That’s enough comment spamming from you. 10 comments and all you’ve done is spam YouTube videos. You’re done here.