Michael Hausam:
Gallup CEO Jim Clifton started a firestorm this week with his article titled “The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment.” Clifton appeared on Fox News to discuss the topic:
“Here’s something that many Americans — including some of the smartest and most educated among us — don’t know: The official unemployment rate, as reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, is extremely misleading.
Right now, we’re hearing much celebrating from the media, the White House and Wall Street about how unemployment is “down” to 5.6%. The cheerleading for this number is deafening. The media loves a comeback story, the White House wants to score political points and Wall Street would like you to stay in the market.”
He gave 4 reasons in defense of his assertion:
- If someone has not looked for a job in the last 4 weeks, they are not included.
- If someone has worked at least one hour and are paid at least $20 for it, they are not included.
- If someone works a part-time job, regardless if it is dramatic under-employment with regards to education or past-work history, they are not included.
- Only 44% of adults are actually working, which Gallup defines as thirty or more hours a week.
He concluded:
Like Jonathan Gruber, Michael Hausam may believe that you’re stupid.
What the Bureau of Labor Statistics is doing is setting parameters. If any statistic is to be meaningful and useful in any way, whatever it is you’re counting has got to be precisely defined. Keeping that in mind, let’s consider Clifton’s criticisms, point by point:
What sense would it make to include people who haven’t even bothered to look for work for over a month? For whatever reason, they aren’t part of the unmet need that’s being measured. People who have a serious unmet need generally attempt to satisfy it.
This seems arbitrary, but it isn’t. For the purpose of deriving a meaningful and useful statistic, either you have worked or you haven’t. What would be totally arbitrary and subject to manipulation would be to set a parameter that answers the question Have you recently been employed? with something other than a straightforward Yes or No answer.
Correct. If you are working, for the purposed of gathering data to provide a meaningful and useful statistic about unemployment, you are not unemployed. Refer to the preceding paragraph.
He’s just inserted Gallup’s definition of “working” as opposed to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s definition of “unemployed,” along with a percentage. This is some pretty slick sleight of hand. These definitions are not actually two sides of the same coin. You’re expected to miss that point. You’re supposed to do the quick arithmetic, and be shocked at how deceptive the BLS is obviously being.
Gallup CEO Jim Clifton is deliberately conflating the methodology of data collection with an attempt at deception. The alternative—that he really believes the purpose of setting parameters is to cook the results—would make me question the unbiased nature of Gallup’s polls and surveys. I suppose he might just be another CEO who doesn’t really understand the technical details of the service his own corporation provides.
Let’s keep in mind that the republicans do the same thing with they are in office.
BLS Given: (US Citizenry over age 16 eligible to work) 100% – 63.7% (Current employed workforce including those unemployed yet collecting unemployment insurance) = 36.3% (workforce eligible yet unemployed citizens).
100% – 63.7% = 36.3%
or in real numbers
243,284,000 eligible to work
– 154,975,000 employed
= 88,309,000 unemployed
Simple subtraction it’s not hard at all.
Remember that the BLS is counting some unemployed as being “in the workforce” so long as their unemployment insurance lasts. Now if we add in those ‘unemployed but receiving unemployment compensation’ unemployed with the rest of the unemployed but eligible to work we get:
5.6% Unemployed getting comp $) + 36.3% (Unemployed not getting comp $) = 41.9% (total unemployed citizens who are eligible to work.)
So simple even Greg can do the math.
@Greg:
what a stupid statement. So you have been out of work for two years, have applied at every place within the civilized world have made hundreds of phone calls, have just made a round and touched base for the nth time and just because you don’t make a trip to visit someone for a 4 week period, you’re no longer unemployed? Well, allright Greg.
So, someone that has worked one hour in the last: day? week? month? year? without defining ‘when, it is totally arbitrary.
Any person not working ‘full time’ as they themselves define it, should be considered as ‘unemployed’. The ‘real’ unemployment rate as of today is about 10.5%
Ditto showed the number that everybody should be looking at which is the labor force participation rate and it has been declining year after year. That number tells the real of the story of the Obama recovery…
Now we just need to wait for one of the liberal posters on here to say “it’s baby boomers, it’s baby boomers”.
Bottom line is there are less of us working to support more of those who have chosen to not work.
@Ditto, #3:
36.3 percent is not the same as the unemployment rate, because not everyone over 16 who is eligible to work wants or needs to work. Those classified as eligible include full-time students, parents staying at home to raise children or staying at home as full-time homemakers, those engaging in remunerative activities that aren’t classified as jobs, and people who have elected to cease working after having pursued highly successful careers in the past.
As pointed out, the BLS’s unemployment rate is not intended as a measure of people who are not working. It’s intended as a measure of an unmet need: It’s a measure of those who need and are seeking jobs, but cannot find them.
@Redteam, #4:
You’re simply defining the excluded category—people who haven’t looked for a job in over a month—in a way that supports your argument. There’s no logical reason of any sort to define them in that fashion.
I don’t believe that most people who want jobs but remain without any sort of work after 2 years of job seeking are in that situation entirely as a result of current economic conditions.
@Bobachek:
I would take issue with the “chosen not to work” part of your statement. Just because a person’s unemployment compensation has run out and they are no longer counted as “being in the workforce,” doesn’t justify an assumption that they are not seeking employment. Many of us know friends or family members who are long term unemployed skilled workers who are still trying to find a job, but there are simply not enough jobs out there. It is also true that in this job market it is not uncommon for there to be hundreds of applicants for each position. The BLS and government “assumes” that these people are no longer looking for employment, which may be true for some, but is not true for all.
It’s easy for those with jobs or who are retired to sit back and tell these people that they should go back to school (lacking income a difficult solution to pursue,) or that they should take any job they can find (again, with the overwhelming competition for what few jobs are out there, and ignoring the possibility of being deemed “overqualified” by an employer, that’s not necessarily going to ensure that they will be hired over the multitude of other applicants). Yet progressive Democrats and Republican establishment elite seek to make these desperate job seekers compete with legal and illegal immigrants for the few jobs that are available, with Obamacare giving an added incentive for employers to choose immigrants over us citizens. Is it any wonder that the people have lost faith in both parties and given up voting for establishment candidates who give them lip service promises during the elections, but once elected only represent their political cronies, Wall Street and the US Chamber of Commerce?
What is needed, and the people have been demanding of their government(s) for over six years, is for politicians is to find ways to encourage job creation and the hiring of us citizens. But the leadership of both parties are too concerned with what their elitist, progressive-establishment country club fellows and big money backers tell them to do and the people’s demands can go to hell.
The job market has changed. Corporations that initially boosted profits by offshoring factories and lesser skilled manufacturing occupations have moved on to the offshoring of highly skilled and technical occupations. Service occupations that don’t need to be localized near the demand have also been offshored. (When was the last time to talked to technical support in connection with any sophisticated piece of electronic equipment, and found yourself speaking with someone inside the United States? These days you might even find a routine inquiry about your telephone billing hooks you up with a customer service department on the other side of the planet.) The same corporations have also kept untold billions of dollars in profits offshore, to avoid taxes.
All of this has serious consequences for American workers and the American middle class. It’s a road to enormous piles of money for others, however. That’s the reason it’s been happening. Anyone who thinks their prosperity automatically equates with better times for all needs to think again. That’s a claim that’s been successfully used to sell a bill of goods.
Fortunately for those running the scam, they’ve also been highly successful at convincing people that it’s someone else that’s robbing them. They’ve got highly paid people to take care of that part of the operation.
@Greg:
Try to spin it as you will, this does not change the fact that they are unemployed now does it?
Bullcrap. It is a politically derived formula created to disguise the actual unemployment rate and enable politicians to spin the numbers to make the situation look better than it is. Both major political parties are culpable for this statistical dishonesty.
The BLS’s “unemployment rate” ONLY includes those who are currently registered in the nation’s government Unemployment Agencies’, those dropped out of those systems are no longer counted, so you and the BLS assume that they cease to exist, just as you and the Federal government also assume that all those who have dropped from the systems are “no longer looking for work”. Clearly a false assumption on your part when you consider the fact that businesses continually report averages of hundreds of applicants per job.
When else in the history of the US was the unemployment rate 5.7%, and at the same time had 46-48 million on foodstamps?
@Pete:
of course the TRUE number is much higher.
@Ditto, #10:
What it means is that a significant portion of the total of all people who, for one reason or another, are not working is in no way relevant to any meaningful discussion about unemployment.
The BLS unemployment rate is intended to measure a very specific thing. People who aren’t even looking for work are not part of the thing being measured. To include them only distorts the result.
Jim Clifton would like to obscure that fact, because he wants to claim that the problem of unemployment is much worse than it actually is. He’s the one who’s spinning out a bullshit argument. He’s playing games with the meanings of words: Unemployed means not working. Therefore…
Uh, no. To the BLS, unemployment has a very clearly defined meaning. If it didn’t, there would be no point in bothering to take a count and report a number, because the number won’t give anyone a clue about what’s actually going on in the world.
@Greg:
Of course it is relevant. All those people are unemployed. You can rationalize all you want about the “why” but it doesn’t change the fact that each and every one of them is eligible to work, yet unemployed. Just because someone is dropped from the unemployment rolls doesn’t make them any less unemployed. College graduates who are looking but can not find a job are in fact unemployed as well. However, the BLS’s statistical criteria arbitrarily excludes both these groups and many others as not being “in the workforce.”
The BLS uses certain statistical criteria to narrowly redefine the meaning of “workforce” to one which fit’s their specific criteria. When the actual definition of “workforce ” clearly means the entire 100% of the populous that BLS starts out with as being “16 or over and eligible to work”
Jim Clifton and the Gallup polling organization have no motive to obscure the fact.
No, you are confusing what the BLS in their specific statistical criteria defines as the unemployment rate, which they base on a percentage of those they specify as being “in the workforce,” and disingenuously trying to claim that their statistically misleading unemployment rate equates to the actual number of unemployed. It doesn’t, and by excluding large numbers of the citizenry, can not possibly as you say “…give anyone a clue about what’s actually going on..”. The BLS’s statistics are in fact designed to give an obfuscated, misleading report of what is really going on. Both Democrat and Republican politicians try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes with such statistical tricks, but the real numbers don’t lie, and we haven’t even delved into how may of those jobs are salaried, full-time, “Obama’s full time,” part time, or the wage structures.
It’s very simple. If you are of proper age and are eligible to work, you are part of the nation’s potential “workforce” If you are so and have a job, you are “employed.” If you are eligible to work and you don’t have a job (for whatever reason,) you are “unemployed.”
Clearly my definition of “unemployed” is fully equable with and meets every single above definition. The BLS’s much more narrow and dishonest redefinition of the term (by virtue of the fact that it excludes large percentages of the public, simply because they are not in the nation’s Unemployment System’s database, while also excluding them from even being counted in the workforce) does not meet any of the proper definitions of “unemployed.”
@Ditto, #14:
Each and every one could be eligible to work. That doesn’t matter. If they’re not seeking jobs and haven’t sought jobs for over a month, they’re not part of the group that want jobs but can’t find them. That’s the group that BLS is attempting to measure and track. Their definition has nothing to do dishonesty. It has everything to do with clarity, and with producing a statistic that’s genuinely useful.
Consider all of the different definitions of “unemployed” that you just posted. How meaningful would the calculated unemployment rate be, if people collecting the data were allowed to chose any definition of “unemployed” that caught their fancy? The number would become meaningless.
The noun form of the topmost group of definitions you posted probably comes closest to what the BLS is trying to measure: “People who are involuntarily out of work considered as a group.” Able people who aren’t looking for jobs and haven’t done so for a month generally can’t be said to be involuntarily out of work.
@Greg: Face it Greg. Obama changed the metrics to make it appear that his administration is improving the economy by reducing the “unemployment rate.” He was very successful in reducing the unemployment rate by manipulating numbers, not by reducing the unemployed. It is a scam!
@Greg:
What are you a mind reader? How do you know that all these people haven’t been looking for work? How do you know they haven’t don so for over a month? What is your basis of proof of your claim that all these people haven’t looked for work for over a month? You don’t know that for a fact, you’re just speculating. And even if they did stop looking for one month, you don’t know what’s going on in their lives or in their particular job market, but in order to justify ignoring them you simple decide that they are no longer voluntarily unemployed. If you are a skilled worker looking all over for a job in an area of your expertise, and there currently are none to be found, Greg the troll has deemed that you are “voluntarily” unemployed. Gee what a swell guy you are Greg. I bet you really identify with Scrooge.
That’s ridiculous, even the BLS doesn’t claim that those people are “voluntarily” out of work. And where are you getting this definition that if they haven’t looked for a job in a month that they can’t be considered involuntarily out of work? You are caught in a hole and rationalizing desperately trying to trying to justify the BLS’s deceitful Unemployment rate that everyone knows was designed to make the unemployment situation look rosier so as to avoid the real truth.
No it doesn’t “comes closest” doesn’t count. You are only trying to use part of that definition to justify your convoluted, cold hearted and absurd claim that if a person takes a single month off from job hunting, that they are no longer to be considered voluntarily unemployed. The BLS, like you, purposely uses specific, very narrow definition of “unemployed” so as to avoid looking at the bigger picture.
You’re grasping at straws Greg. None of your dissembling changes the truth: That a huge percentage of our population does not have jobs, can not find employment and are thus still are unemployed. And no. You don’t get to dismiss them with an assumption that they are all “voluntarily” out of work. You see, even if you use convoluted reasoning to deem all 36.3% of these people to be “voluntarily unemployed”, this does not change the fact that they by your very words are confirmed as being “unemployed”.
@Randy, #16:
That’s what his opponents are claiming. Making a claim and endlessly repeating it doesn’t make it true. Repetition is not an argument; it’s a propaganda technique.
Obama was not born in Nigeria. Obama is not a secret Muslim. Obama is not conspiring to destroy America. Obama is not about to confiscate everyone’s guns, or declare martial law and cancel elections, or throw all of his political enemies into secret FEMA concentration camps, or declare himself Emperor of the Cosmos for Life.
The unemployment rate actually has dropped significantly from the highest point it reached during the worst recession since the Great Depression. Most people don’t need to study charts and graphs to figure that the economy is much better now than it was then, or that a lot fewer people are out of work now than then.
@Ditto, #17:
No, I’m not a mind reader, nor is any statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s precisely why people who have not made any effort to find a job for over a month must be excluded from the count in determining an official unemployment rate. There’s absolutely no way to determine with certainty why they are no longer looking, and there are many possible reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the unavailability of a job.
Every single person that stops working permanently for any reason other than disability or death goes through a period of one month when they’re neither working nor looking for a job. What would be the sense of including every one of them in the unemployment rate calculation? If you did, you would know with certainty that the resulting figure was inaccurate.
Obviously it will render the result inaccurate if you count them. Clearly there’s no practical way to determine exactly why each person who hasn’t looked for a job for a month has not done so. So, you’re left with excluding that unknowable element from the count entirely. If someone hasn’t bothered to look for work for an entire month, whatever the reason, they’re out of the count. That way the entire unknowable element is consistently eliminated. No one is hiding the fact that it’s being done. It has been part of the unemployment rate computation all along. There’s simply no other logical way to deal with what you don’t know and can’t find out.
Jim Clifton should be fully aware of this. I suspect that he is. He also probably knows that his target audience isn’t.
@Greg: Ditto’s question was “how do you know if someone has ‘looked’ for work in the last month? If I go into McDonalds and put in an application, how does the bls know that I did so? If they don’t know it, and of course they don’t, then I would be considered as ‘not looking for work’. If I put in 4 apps, does it count as 4 unemployed? What you’re trying to say makes absolutely no sense.
@Redteam, #20:
The information used to determine the unemployment rate is gathered from monthly surveys conducted with around 60,000 sample households consisting of around 110,000 individuals. The participating households are asked directly if household members who are not working have actively sought jobs during the past month. An explanation of the entire process can be found here. If you examine the rest of the page, you’ll also find a clear explanation of what is meant by actively seeking a job.
What I’ve said makes sense. What Jim Clifton is saying is nonsense.
@Greg:
Your logic is flawed. The later does not equate to the former. Every person who “stops looking for work for a month,” does not necessarily stop looking for work permanently.
To get an accurate count of the actual number of unemployed, you have to count all those who are unemployed, not a select group. Pretending that they all will never look for work again is a fallacious and purely speculative argument. Your answer makes no sense whatsoever.
We already know with certainty that the current resultant figure is inaccurate, because it leaves out large segments of society who are unemployed, many long term, who are still looking for work. How would including a count of the unemployed that includes those who ‘stopped looking for work for a one month period’ and who are still unemployed or long term unemployed, all of whom may have resumed looking for work after whatever situation caused them to have to stop looking for a month, (illness, being evicted, etc…) result in an inaccurate count When they are still unemployed?
Greg you are trying to exclude 88+ million unemployed citizens from being counted as unemployed based on an assumed technicality that they may have stopped looking for a job for a 4 week period. While at the same time claiming that doing so gives a more accurate picture of the true unemployment situation in the US, all based on a less than 0.7% “sampling” of 60,000 households. Are you really so dense that you can’t understand how insane and morally bereft that sounds?
I take it back, you’re worse than Scrooge, as you care nothing for the unemployed if the uncomfortable truth of their existence makes your political idol look bad. By my book that makes you a heartless politically driven sociopath.
@Ditto, #22:
I made no such statement. What I said was that every person who stops work permanently—excepting those who have become permanently disabled or dead—have an initial month when they are no longer actively seeking employment. I then pointed out that including people who haven’t sought work for an entire month in the unemployment count would clearly introduce error into the result, because the count would then automatically include large numbers of people who are not working by choice. People who have permanently left the job market by choice all have a first month when they’re no longer actively seeking employment.
@Redteam:
Clearly from Greg’s answer he doesn’t know and neither does the BLS. He’s just pretending that the numbers the BLS receives from it’s very limited survey, (rather than actually counting or even looking at the last census,) tell the whole story.
@Greg:
What you said was:
Then you said:
Followed by:
All of which clearly spells out that you believe that anyone who takes a one month break from job hunting as you said: “must be excluded from the count in determining an official unemployment rate. ” There is no wiggle room there, and your own words claim it is necessary to get an “official count”. You also said:
Aside from your own insisting that we “must” change the meaning of the word “unemployment” You provide no reasonable explanation why we “must” change the meaning of the word from the accepted meaning that all dictionaries describe the word to mean. Your only justification is to tell us that that since they aren’t looking for a job, or they took a break from looking for a month, that they suddenly and magically can no longer be considered as unemployed. That’s absolute poppy-cock and you know it. Your logic is flawed and makes no sense, as it relies on creating an excuse not to count some of the unemployed. Your insistence in doing so is that you claim that we will come out with an “inaccurate number of unemployed” if you count all those persons who are eligible to work but are not employed. However, by your twisted logic, if we create certain criteria to eliminate having to count a good many of the unemployed, you insanely hold that we will have a more accurate count.
Greg, you are clearly off your rocker. How will the result of unemployed persons be inaccurate, if you count more of the unemployed, than a if you create a reason to disqualify the unemployed, whom by every honest dictionary interpretation of the word “unemployed” are still in fact “unemployed”. None of the dictionary definitions you can find anywhere for the word “unemployed” has a qualifier that says “except those who stop looking for a job”. Your revisionist interpretation of the word “unemployed” is invalid. It’s based on deranged political double-speak.
It will make sense enough to anyone who understands what was said.
@Ditto:
If Gullible Greggie is so damn good at determining unemployment statistics, then perhaps he should be CEO of Gallup instead of pandering for Obama.
When you’re conducting statistical studies, you have to define the things that you’re measuring very precisely. If you don’t, the results are totally useless. Someone’s 100-year-old grandmother could easily meet a general dictionary definition of “unemployed.” Including her when computing the national unemployment rate would be ridiculous, however. She isn’t really part of what the BLS is trying to accurately measure and track.
I don’t know why this principle is difficult to grasp.
@retire05:
It’s the way with these dishonest globalist progressives. If they don’t want to accept the truth, the actual numbers or it hurts their argument. They redefine the terms to make the words mean what they want, they find a way to alter the numbers so it doesn’t look so bad, they blame it on someone else, or they rely on convolution to spin, alter or ignore data to fit their web of lies.
In this case Greg and the BLS don’t want to accept that so many people are unemployed, so they simply pretend they don’t exist by redefining what the meaning of “unemployed” is. Embarrassing problem solved. Even the BLS doesn’t use that stupid, load of manure claim of Greg’s that a “voluntarily unemployed” person must not be considered to be “unemployed”.
Those of us who rely on logic and facts understand that: if a person is not employed, but they are eligible and capable of working, that they are still considered “unemployed” regardless of the reason why they are unemployed.
@Greg:
The chances are pretty good that if someone has a 100 year old grand mother, the grandmother is most likely retired. Retired persons by definition of the term “retired” are not considered part of the workforce.
@Ditto, #29:
A very large percentage of retired people would still meet the definitions listed in #14. Apparently we do need to define our terms a bit more precisely than standard dictionary entries.
@Greg:
Precise may ass. There’s nothing “precise” about their measurement whatsoever. They rely on a survey of less 0.7 % of the citizens to make an “estimate” of how many have jobs and how many are unemployed, but they use a process of elimination that guarantees that they will count only a small portion of the unemployed, leaving huge numbers of the unemployed uncounted. If you operated a business and your CPA was so “precise”, you would have no idea where you stand financially, and would likely be audited by the IRS and end up in jail. Their measurement methodology (that you naively accept as “precise”) would if used in the real business world or military have said statisticians up on charges of incompetence or fraud.
@Ditto, #32:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics routinely uses a statistical sample that’s much larger than any of the polls that Gallup or any other polling entity takes. Gallup’s sample sizes run from 1,000 to 1,500 individuals, compared with BLS’s monthly sample size of around 110,000 individuals. The BLS sample size is somewhere from 70 to 100 times larger.
Further, the BLS also takes pains to exclude factors that would increase the probability of error—factors such as the one you’ve for some reason decided to fixate on and quibble about. They’ve clearly defined the thing they’re attempting to measure, and measure it using the same parameters every time they do it.
Consequently, the BLS’s statistical results are much more likely to be accurate than the polls conducted by Gallup, or by any other well regarded, self described scientific polling service. Republicans, of course, don’t like those results, although they would have enormously happy with both the results and the methodology that produced them if the numbers had been reported during a republican presidency. Basically, the same survey questions, definitions, and methodology have been used by BLS since 1994. Only now have they suddenly been viewed as faulty.
@Greg:
You should stop trying to feed us bullcrap while telling us it’s chocolate cake. You aren’t fooling or impressing anyone here Greg but yourself. If you think that it is only “now” that the BLS’s statistical data has been questioned, it can only be because you have been naively happy with the spoon fed pablum of government politicians and the MSM. (Like many other of the low information public). As it was put so succinctly by Jack Nicholson “You can’t handle the truth.” And what’s more, you don’t want to handle the truth. You would rather trust in statistical garbage and let the government blow smoke up your ass, than recognize when you are being played for a fool. In this day and age of data computerized mining by the Federal government, monitoring nearly everything we do, your premise that the BLS doesn’t have the ability to gather more significant and specific related information, is pure horse crap. If you want precision measurement you go to a mathematician. If you don’t care about accuracy, but instead want the numbers to provide a carefully managed result, you go to a statistician.
My work in the field of military and civilian spacecraft command control – data acquisition systems, computer-controlled electronics and earth-space sciences, is dependent on precision calculations and detailed measurement of data and systems and careful analysis of the same, and I assure you I can recognize the difference between methods designed to create precise significant readings, and those that rely on woefully insufficient data which can only result in inaccurate conclusions (garbage in – garbage out). Which is precisely the problem with the BLS unemployment rate, which relies on cherry-picked data and reports given by statisticians, rather than an honest unbiased and complete research of all available datum. An inadequate sampling survey of such small size is never going to provide a “precise” measurement of anything. All a small sampling survey can possibly provide is a theoretical estimate based on the data collected. When you selectively bias a survey or poll by only considering a specific portion of the data while ignoring significant other portions of directly related data, which could without question directly effect the results, all results will be terribly flawed with inaccuracy and lead to false conclusions.
So, where do the alternate numbers that critics of the BLS offer come from? Are they performing some sort of super-secret statistically study each month, utilizing samples much larger than those collected by the BLS, which somehow have a greater degree of accuracy because they not only know who is and isn’t working, but exactly why they are or are not?
I think not. I think the administration’s critics are pretty much pulling numbers out of thin air, when they even bother to state any. They obviously have no problem whatsoever making claims when there’s little or nothing of substance to back them up. And while data and other supporting evidence are more often than not missing, there’s seldom any shortage of obvious ulterior motives for making the claims that they do. At this point, I see little or no reason why I should trust anything the GOP or the special interests that they represent say, unless they can present enough verifiable evidence to allow me to draw the same conclusions myself. What they’ve earned over the many years that I’ve been watching them is my distrust.
I’ll consider the BLS unemployment rate estimates to be the best available until somebody can explain why their own alternative numbers are better. They’re not perfect, but they’re all we’ve got that can be relied on. I also think statistical estimates are the best that can be done. I don’t believe any method currently exists to take an actual count at any particular point in time.
@Greg:
I don’t know who you are talking about and I don’t think you do either. I stated the source of my numbers. It’s not my fault if you can’t keep up.
Get this through your thick skull Greg, I not going through all this to attack Obama, I’m trying to make the damn point that there are enormous numbers of unemployed that are uncounted, that are treated by both sides of the aisle as if they don’t exist. This is not about any one party or political office holder, but about a Washington establishment that has been purposely misleading the public with statistical bullshit. I have already told you Greg, that I haven’t singled out “the administration” in my pointing out that the BLS numbers are both incomplete and woefully incorrect, but you have your head so far your butt in your partisan spinning to protect Obama, that you are blinded by your party loyalty. As far as I’m concerned this his has nothing to do with political party affiliation. This is about flawed, dishonest reporting by a Federal agency based on their own bias-introduced methodological that ensures that not only will their conclusions be inaccurate, but that they ignore a not-insignificant portion of society, purposely to paint a false picture. This has been going on for a very long time under the presidential administrations of both parties.
There is no accuracy in the BLS’s unemployment rate because it only counts a very narrow portion of society. It is designed to ignore a greater portion of society that is also unemployed. But you are such a stupidly loyal party worshiper that you insist on continual evasions and redefinition of terms, like some kind of flat-earth ignorant fanatic, simply because you have gotten it in your head that I’m using this to attack Obama. I have had this same discussion many times for many years, with other Democrats, Libertarians and Republicans who understand and agree that the BLS is not giving an accurate measure of the unemployed. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, or are you going to continue playing the partisan ass?