They include in their ranks Congressman Allen West, former GE CEO Jack Welch, and more. The panel at Morning Joe cast suspicion on the numbers (“it doesn’t make sense”) but didn’t accuse anyone of cooking the books. Ezra Klein dismisses the claims outright, theorizing that we’re at “that moment in the election when people begin to lose their minds.” Labor economist Betsey Stephenson says that “anyone who thinks that political folks can manipulate the unempt data are completely ignorant about how BLS works & how data are compiled,” and Michael Tomasky notes that “if the administration were somehow manipulating the data, then they’re doing a terrible job at it.” Far-right Obama-hater Erick Erickson doesn’t doubt the numbers’ validity, though he doesn’t think they’re ultimately good news. source
Number-crunchers over at the Bureau of Labor and Statistics realized today that between April 2011 and March 2012, there were 300,000 more jobs created than originally estimated. If this upward revision is correct, President Obama is now in the green for job growth, having overseen a net gain in roughly 100,000 since taking office. This has just been an astonishingly bad week for Mitt Romney. source
» A somewhat odd note from the article: ”In the two months since the survey was conducted, a large share of participants have had their phone numbers disconnected and could not be reached.” Now it’s possible they all got new cell phone numbers, or that they’re simply hard to track. But still, that’s not a common thing to happen in a survey.
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» So what about the remaining employees? No one is quite certain what plans CEO Meg Whitman has for the future of the company, though expectations are high considering her time as eBay’s chief executive. CareerBliss, a company with the stated goal of “helping you find happiness in the workplace”, says that employees have been less happy since Whitman became the company’s chief executive. Following reports of the layoffs, CareerBliss CEO and co-founder Heidi Golledge told Business Insider that honesty just might be the best policy. “This is a time for her and her team to be totally transparent,” said Golledge, adding, “HP employees need to be confident that the company has a future – and, just as importantly, that they have a future with it.”
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If the same percentage of adults were in the workforce today as when Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate would be 11.1 percent. If the percentage was where it was when George W. Bush took office, the unemployment rate would be 13.2 percent.Ezra Klein • Remarking on declining labor force participation in the US. It’s often noted that official unemployment numbers understate the real percentage of people out of work, as they only tally people actively searching for a job. One consequence of this is that when labor force participation decreases—that is, when unemployed folks just give up and stop looking for work—employment actually “increases.” That’s why only 115,000 jobs were added last month, yet unemployment decreased from 8.2% to 8.1%. Since Barack Obama took office, labor force participation has declined 2%. It’s now at 63.6% which, Klein notes, is “a level not seen since the early days of the Reagan administration.” Here’s a chart. source (via • follow)
» Signs of overall improvement: Economists say that the modest growth the economy is showing is decent for now but could show much stronger results later in the year — a theory supported by the rise in consumer spending in February. Most notably, some states which were hard hit by the housing collapse are showing signs of life, including Florida (with an unemployment rate that’s fallen below 10 percent in the past year), Michigan (below 9 percent in part because of the auto industry’s rebound) and California (whose 10.9 percent unemployment is nonetheless much better than it was a year ago). Think the trend will keep ticking upward?
Richard Blumenthal is on the case, guys.
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‘The unemployment rate continued to trend downward Friday, reaching 8.3 percent, the lowest rate in three years.
Our own more inclusive statistic that adds the underemployed and those who want a job but have been out of work so long the government no longer counts them is down to 16.9 percent for January.
That’s the lowest we’ve seen since we started tracking the figure in January 2010.’
This month’s unemployment numbers, in non-slicked-over form.
Employment: Defending jobs | The Economist
Looking for a job? These are the world’s top ten employers. Welcome to the new global economy.
So, to put this another way: Pick your poison — communism, socialism, military, Big Macs or iPhones. (Hon Hai is better known as Foxconn, the company that builds many of Apple’s products.) It’s fascinating to see this in perspective.
» Another month of 9-plus-percent unemployment: Of the past 28 months, 26 of them have sported unemployment above 9 percent. And here’s a number that will depress the crap out of you — 14 million people are currently unemployed, which makes job gains of 100,000 seem like not enough, let alone completely flat months like August.
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