More funny numbers in February jobs report

I just don’t believe what’s coming out of the Obama administration any more. We need third-party corroboration on everything.

This past week the administration released its February jobs report. At least the New York Times admitted that the February jobs numbers are not reassuring. But it’s worse than they’re letting on. They say the improvement in the unemployment rate is mainly because of people giving up looking and thus there is a decline in the baseline size of the labor force. No – it is entirely because of a decline in the size of a labor force. And it will not take eight years, at this rate, to bring the jobless rate back to what it was in December 2007. It will take forever, because we have lost ground over the past year and not gained any.

First, it takes 130,000 jobs per month just to keep up with the growth in population. If we believe the Labor Department that 190,000 jobs were created in February, yes, that’s good that there is enough job growth to bring the rate down for at least one month. But over the past year there is a deep accumulated shortfall that has increased with every month with only a few exceptions.

Second, many people are losing trust that we’re even getting the numbers right. The Labor Department is reporting the unemployment rate declined from 9.0% to 8.9%. Sorry, I just don’t believe it. Thankfully, we’re getting the true unemployment rate from Gallup now. I find them more trustworthy on this. They reported that the unemployment rate inched up to 10.3% for February. Here is their graph of the past twelve months:

Gallup unemployment rate

And the underemployment rate as reported by Gallup is 19.9% for February.

Not a pretty picture of the economy.

About mesasmiles

By Dr. David Hall. Dr. Hall runs Infinity Dental Web, a small company that does Internet marketing for dentists. He has had a long-standing interest in politics and as a college student toyed with the idea of a political career.
This entry was posted in Economy and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *