The Job Market Still Stinks
No conspiracy theories needed.
_____________________________________
Note: This column went up at PJ Media and was teased here at BizzyBlog on Monday.
_____________________________________
After the release of Friday’s employment report showing that the nation’s unemployment rate had dropped below 8% in September for the first time in 44 months, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis appeared on CNBC, claiming to feel “insulted” by those who believe that its numbers were conveniently cooked for President Obama’s electoral advantage. She further asserted: “We have a very professional civil service organization (with) … top economists … these are our best-trained and best-skilled individuals.”
With the exception of at least two economists who have donated to political campaigns (but who don’t appear to have been in positions to influence the numbers), Solis appears to be mostly right about the professionalism at her department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those who toil there should feel insulted at how Solis and whoever else is responsible chose to present the information in September’s Employment Situation Summary.
The primary bone of contention is the September increase of 873,000, according to the BLS’s Household Survey (based on interviews and surveys of heads of households), in the number of people employed. That figure made it into the summary’s narrative, and was explained as follows:
Total employment rose by 873,000 in September, following 3 months of little change.
This was a brazen attempt to make a wildly fluctuating and relatively unimportant figure in a survey where the primary mission is to estimate the percentage of people who are not employed seem more important than the mediocre seasonally adjusted September job additions of 114,000 in the Establishment Survey of employers. I reviewed this year’s first eight Employment Situation Summaries; the Household Survey’s specific employment pickup or loss was never mentioned in any of them.
One could argue that the September increase was too big to ignore and had to be cited to address inevitable questions. If so, then the report should have noted the figure’s historically wild fluctuations and relative insignificance instead of blandly telling readers about three previous months of alleged “little change” — an assertion which was itself quite deceptive, especially when comparing the Household Survey’s results for the past seven months to the Establishment Survey:
While the Establishment Survey has been showing job growth plodding along at a mostly tepid pace, adding an average of 111,000 jobs a month during the past seven months, the Household Survey’s total employment figure has seen month-to-month differences varying from the Establishment Survey by several hundred thousand in both directions. That’s hardly “little change,” Hilda.
Of course, the press couldn’t resist reporting the highly unreliable figure. It made it into the second paragraph at the Associated Press, aka the Administration’s Press, while the Establishment Survey result got mentioned in Paragraph 3. The New York Times saved the Household Survey’s 873,000 employment growth figure for a later paragraph, but implausibly claimed that “its credibility was bolstered by an unexpectedly robust rise in consumer confidence.” The confidence reference was to a Gallup poll which, as the Times acknowledged, attributed its rise “almost entirely to increased optimism among Democrats.” In other words, confidence is up because many Obama supporters recognize a duty to say that they’re confident even if they’re not.
To the AP’s credit, it noticed, though not until the 24th paragraph of its report, that most of the Household Survey’s employment pickup was in an unimpressive area: “582,000 more people reported that they were working part-time last month but wanted full-time jobs … the biggest increase in so-called underemployed Americans since February 2009.” This is exactly the kind of result Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney was thinking of when he said on Friday: “This is not what a real recovery looks like.”
We haven’t seen what a real recovery looks like since the recession as officially defined ended 39 long months ago. Despite September’s unemployment rate drop:
- That rate has been 7.8% or higher during every single month of Obama’s term, something not seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal extended the Great Depression for eight dreadful years.
- During Obama’s first and hopefully sole presidential term, seasonally adjusted full-time employment reported in the Household Survey has contracted — by 604,000 through September. Meanwhile, part-time employment has ballooned by over 1.5 million.
- In the Establishment Survey, even after considering a pending and preliminary adjustment to total employment of an estimated 386,000 for the 12 months ended in March, the nation’s economy has only added 325,000 jobs since Obama took office. The increase in the number of jobs at temporary help services during that time (570,000 before the pending adjustment) has been far greater.
- In the “What have you done for us lately?” department, seasonally adjusted job growth per the Establishment Survey has averaged only 106,000 per month during the past six months, while monthly private-sector job additions in August and September averaged only 100,000.
- Meanwhile, the Household Survey tells us that every single job added and then some during the past six months (819,000) has been part-time, while full-time employment has dropped by 64,000. Taxmageddon and ObamaCare are already exacting a heavy price.
As to the conspiracy theories, to believe them you’d have to buy into the idea that the BLS’s compilers deliberately showed the contractions seen above in Household Survey employment in July and August, allowing President Obama to continue to get hammered during all of August and September over his administration’s then-unbroken streak of 43 months of 8%-plus unemployment, and then opened the floodgates on October 5, just 32 days before the election — after the travesty of early voting has already begun in some states — to finally get the rate below 8%. Really?
That said, it’s hard to totally blame those who see a conspiracy, simply because this administration, by far the most callously and pervasively dishonest in my lifetime, has given critics so much fodder in so many other areas. To name just a few:
- Its lethal, reality-denying decision-making in Libya and the Middle East, leading it to ramp down and deny adequate security protection to Americans in dangerous situations when it clearly should have been increased.
- Its craven yet still unadmitted willingness to flood Mexico with guns which could only be “traced” after their murderous use.
- Its open political favoritism in “green jobs”-related loans and grants.
- Finally, in a brazen repeat of what occurred during the 2008 presidential campaign, the president’s campaign has again “chosen not to use AVS (Address Verification System) in screening contributions made by credit card,” potentially (i.e., more than likely) “accepting contributions from phony names or accepting contributions from foreigners, both of which are illegal.”
This horror show on virtually all fronts can’t end soon enough.
To be fair to the conspiracy theorists, if someone was cooking the books they might be betting on that fact that many voters aren’t going to look as hard at the figures as you and I, and not really think about the previous 8% number in July and August and only fixate on the most recent 7.8% number and assume that means Obama’s “policies” are “working” and that if they give him another four years he’ll bring employment all the way back. Also, the vast majority of voters are going to vote on Election Day and not vote early.
Not that I believe there was deliberate cooking myself, though I do think Obama and crew have misrepresented the numbers to try and gain an advantage, but the conspiracy tact is not quite as weak as you make out.
And like you said, when you have an administration as corrupt, dishonest and willing to fudge figures and lie about facts like Obama and crew, then they are going to open themselves to conspiracy accusations like the BLS one and really have no one to blame but themselves.
Comment by zf — October 10, 2012 @ 8:23 am
#1, but I would think that the cooking would had to have occurred in the report that came out after Labor Day to have sufficient impact.
Comment by Tom — October 10, 2012 @ 8:34 am
Oh, but its going to stink worse since employers have to plan on ObamaCare being fully enacted even if Romney is elected. All businesses must follow the law that IS in place until it is no longer on the books. Hence welcome to the under employment economy where full time workers become a thing of the past because of the meddling by liberals in things they are clueless. Every act has consequences.
Que one restaurant chain’s response:
Darden tests limiting worker hours as health-care changes loom
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-darden-part-time-workers-20121007,0,1505128.story
The upshot here for the American worker in the long term IF ObamaCare is allowed to stand, the foolish insistence by government that the employer has to provide health insurance will force American workers to have two jobs not one to support their families. In the end, the fringe benefit called health insurance may disappear and individuals will have to purchase it directly or go without.
However, there is an emerging trend in the commercial sector to go with SELF INSURANCE by employers who want to keep the health insurance benefit. The nuance about this approach is that it is not subject to ObamaCare or State insurance commissions! Ironically it was state insurance commissions who started the ball rolling on whether an employer found it affordable to provide health insurance by larding up the minimum coverage for a health insurance company to sell a policy in that state. Large insurance companies ran off their competition by getting the state insurance commissions to continually increase the minimum coverage until there was no competition left. The response: Self Insured employers have a health insurance company administer the benefit for the company, hence it ceases to be “insurance”. The company purchases stop loss insurance to cover those years in which the cost of self insurance exceeds a predetermined amount to limit their liability.
The bottom line here is that health insurance is going to change to mitigate the government’s meddling and in the end the traditional model is going to disappear. This is NOT what liberals wanted or envisioned – too bad, so sad and once again proves central planning never gets the outcome they scheme to achieve. Silly liberals, life is about reality not utopia. So now they are threatening health insurance via more regulations, however, in doing so they will have to swallow the poison pill of making ALL employers drop coverage.
Obama Administration Signals that Small Businesses May Not Get to Keep Their Self-Insured Health Plans.
http://obamacarewatcher.org/articles/410
An increasing percentage of American workers obtain their health insurance from employers who self-insure their employees’ health benefits by assuming the risk of paying their employees’ health claims.[2]
Self-insurance is attractive to businesses because it provides them the flexibility to design their own health plan. Plus, many employers find it a less expensive alternative to purchasing health insurance from an insurance company. And, while self-insured plans are subject to federal regulation, federal law prohibits states from regulating them.[3]
Large employers that self-insure have the personnel to manage the plan and can spread their risk between their many employees. But small employers typically hire an outside, third-party expert to manage their self-insured plan. They also purchase stop-loss insurance to protect themselves from the potential of unusually high health claims.
See how ObamaCare responds when it is threatened with a more efficient alternative? Change the rules to maintain the inefficiency at any cost.
Instead of health exchanges, an enterprising company could offer limited health coverage with high deductibles to provide a stop loss insurance to individuals free from the shackles of the state insurance commission and the federal government. In fact, every employer could predictably budget a fringe benefit and then offer that to any employee regardless of hours worked as a payroll deduction. The employer then could pay an increasing amount of the payroll deduction based on years of service OR average weekly hours OR negotiate with their employee to accept a reduced net pay in lieu of full pay for the coverage. Employers who unilaterally cover employees who get their coverage elsewhere in essence reduce that employees pay since they can’t enjoy the financial benefit of said coverage.
Comment by dscott — October 10, 2012 @ 9:55 am
Instead of Sarah Palin’s “death panels” claim, which is true, being named PolitiFact’s 2009 “lie of the year,” it should have been Obama’s disgraceful assertion that (probably paraphrasing a little) “if you like your current insurance plan (and providers), you’ll be able to keep it (and them).”
Comment by Tom — October 10, 2012 @ 10:00 am
#2, I would think that’s too soon, the closer to the election the better, that avoids the likely possibility of having to do the suspicious deeds again and getting caught.
Comment by zf — October 10, 2012 @ 1:30 pm
#3, That’s how Big Government works, it screws up a situation and then tries to “fix” the situation and by doing so screws it up even more. This keeps happening until everything crashes, i.e. Greece or becomes a disgraceful mess i.e. Britain’s NHS.
Our health care was far from perfect, but it was still the best in the world because it was the least screwed up by government. But now with ObamaCare our system is already well on the road to being completely or near completely screwed up like everywhere else.
The scary part is, what will the world do when the U.S which provides so much of the health care innovation and so much of the specialized health care services in the world is no longer doing so because ObamaCare has destroyed all of that?
Comment by zf — October 10, 2012 @ 1:46 pm