Lucid Links (061109, Morning)
Noteworthy Net-worthies:
The coverage of the news that the oh-so-benevolent government will permit some banks to repay their TARP money is really offensive to those who remember the full story. The money was forced on the banks with “a (figurative) gun pointed at their heads,” yet they have to get permission from Big Nanny to give it back? Any coverage of TARP and the banks that doesn’t mention October’s coercion is by definition incomplete.
There are only so many things you can track daily, and the hateful Playboy blog post targeting 10 female conservatives (since taken down, but preserved by list member Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs) was one of them. The backstory is the apparent banishment of a lefty blogger at AOL’s Political Machine who dared mention the Playboy post. That in turn has given more exposure to the AOL site’s dismissive treatment and dismissal of longtime “non-journalist” bloggers and the fundamental dishonesty of the high and mighty “journalists” now running it. NixGuy, who blogged at AOL for over two years, is mostly on self-imposed hiatus, but emerged to post interesting background and insights here and here.
Liberal men write hate-filled posts about conservative women they can only dream about. Meanwhile, a conservative man demonstrates how to wipe the floor with an MSNBC reporterette who thinks that David Letterman’s “jokes” about Sarah Palin (i.e, that she dresses like a “slutty flight attendant,” and that her daughter was recently “knocked-up by Alex Rodriguez” during a New York Yankees game) are no big deal.
This is from a couple of weeks ago, but it shouldn’t be missed — Dick Morris’s “The Incredible Shrinking Clintons.” It looks like Barack Obama suckered Hillary into becoming Secretary of State, and has now essentially marginalized her.
Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has something called a “birth/death model” that it uses to estimate jobs gained and lost from new business start-ups and business closures. Every month, that estimate is built into the job gain/loss statistics. As seen here (page changes every month), that model’s +220,000 and +226,000 jobs made up the vast majority of May and April 2009’s on-the-ground (i.e., NOT seasonally adjusted) additions of 319,000 and 271,000 jobs, respectively. To be clear, the impact on any given month’s seasonally adjusted jobs number isn’t huge. But if the monthly birth/death estimates are off repeatedly, that’s another story. I’m sure that the BLS’s birth/death model works as well as something inherently imperfect can in normal times; but these aren’t normal times. The POR Economy has imposed an atmosphere of uncertainty (e.g., energy, taxes, regulation) and threat (Chrysler debt, GM debt, TARP) in the private sector the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 1930s. I believe that the general atmosphere of uncertainty is holding back new start-ups, and restraining those who nonetheless take the plunge from taking on employees. If the birth/death model is overstating net gains, as I believe it is, we will see the reported jobs numbers come down significantly when BLS does its annual comprehensive revisions next year.
If the birth/death model is overstating net gains, as I believe it is, we will see the reported jobs numbers come down significantly when BLS does its annual comprehensive revisions next year.
But in the meantime the MSM will propagandize the false information for Obama’s gain. The revision next year does little good to overcome the slick ad campaign that is now gearing up on the created or saved line. All we can do is keep pointing to the monthly net figures to force a reality check and show the public the longer the fish sits, the more it stinks. The only reason for the new model is to support the saved or created narrative, it is therefore a political construct. In fact, I submit contemporaneous record keeping on a this scale of this magnatude is not worth the effort since they could go to the IRS and pull this kind of info on an annual basis much more accurately. Even the Social Security Admin would have this kind of info. Now if neither the IRS or SSA would give this info on a monthly basis then how could we believe the BLS have anything near usable in terms of accuracy? The upshot then the net gains would be based upon “expectations” just like the fraudulent figures given by the political hacks in the Obama Admin.
Comment by dscott — June 11, 2009 @ 11:17 am
#1, it’s not a new model. It’s an existing model that I think is incorrectly estimating what is happening on the ground because of pervasive state-induced uncertainty. For example, if you go to the link you’ll see that they’re estimating a higher level of net start-ups occurred in April and May of this year vs. April-May of last year. Though my intuition could be wrong, that seems intuitively off the mark.
It is “self-correcting,” in the sense that eventually they get to hard data of the type you are referring to — which eventually leads to the annual comprehensive revision.
But your MSM point is right. If the comprehensive revision goes negative bigtime, which I think is where we’re headed, about the only people who will notice are yours truly and the WSJ.
The other point to raise is that even if the net start-ups number is right, how many have a chance of being successful in the current atmosphere of uncertainty (i.e., they may be self-employed, but not gainfully employed) vs. last year at the same time, or other periods when the economy was growing?
Comment by TBlumer — June 11, 2009 @ 11:46 am