EDITORIAL: Obama’s bogus jobs data [ Editado ]

[siboneyes]

If the Economy is better, Record 1.2 Million People Fall Out Of Labor Force In One Month, Labor Force Participation Rate Tumbles To Fresh 30 Year Low?

by Tyler Durden on 02/03/2012

"If the economy is getting better, then why does the number of 'long-term unemployed workers' stay so high? When Barack Obama first took office, the number of 'long-term unemployed workers' in the United States was approximately 2.6 million. Today, that number is sitting at 5.6 million." Three million additional long-term unemployed workers since Obama. How can that be if the economy is getting better?"

BLS Bureau of Labor Statistics Unemployment Withholding taxes

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%.

Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!

So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation. As for the quality of jobs, as withholding taxes roll over Year over year, it can only mean that the US is replacing high paying FIRE jobs with low paying construction and manufacturing. So much for the improvement.

[sirjohn]

EDITORIAL: Obama’s bogus jobs data

Congress should investigate cooked employment books

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

2/3/2012

The White House hyped the news Friday that January payrolls had risen by 243,000. The hitch is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also dropped 1.2 million from the calculated workforce. Somehow this net loss of a million workers in a single month was transformed into an improvement in the unemployment rate. As the old saying goes, figures can lie, and liars can figure.

“Job growth was widespread,” the BLS reported, but most Americans sense that something isn’t quite right with the numbers. The most important change was the deep decline in the workforce. While the overall population jumped an 1.6 million in January, the workforce declined a record-setting 1.2 million. This figure represents those who out of sheer frustration or for other reasons have dropped out of what the government defines as the active labor pool. They are worse than simply unemployed; they are both jobless and hopeless.

The good news for Obama administration statisticians is that these unfortunates don’t factor into the official unemployment rate, which only counts those thought to be looking for work. So while five people drop out of the system in despair for every new job created, the official unemployment rate declines and the White House enjoys a good news day.

“The recovery is speeding up,” President Obama declared. However, the broader measures tell a different story. The employment-to-population ratio, the most comprehensive jobs number, remained flatlined at 58.5 percent, around where is has been for at least a year. The number lacking jobs has likewise remained steady at 41.5 percent. The overall participation rate, the percentage making up the workforce in the population, accelerated an already steep decline to a 30-year low of 63.7 percent. In short, the recovery is not speeding up - people are simply giving up.

The participation rate is a subjective measure and highly subject to manipulation. The lower it goes and the more people are dropped from the unemployment equation, the better the numbers will look for the White House. This figure has been dropping sharply since Mr. Obama took office.

Last month, an analysis at the Zero Hedge financial website noted that by extending the logic of reporting progressively fewer labor-force participants, “America will officially have no unemployed when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5 percent, which should be just before the presidential election.” Maybe that’s the plan.

A year ago, there were 99 million people either officially unemployed or otherwise not working, and the official unemployment rate was 9.1 percent. Now, unemployment reported by the government is down to 8.3 percent, but the number without jobs has topped 100 million. The disconnect between increasing joblessness in America and the rosy White House official statistics should be the subject of a congressional investigation. Something does not add up.

The Washington Times

[siboneyes]

New BS BLS Report Shows Obama Costs US $20 Trillion

By John Ransom 2/4/2012

Hey folks, good news!

Another 1.2 million people dropped out the workforce, which means that Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) economists can say that unemployment has moved down to 8.3 percent without that messy job-creation thing getting in the way.

That’s been such a bummer for Obama. But now he doesn’t have to worry about his programs actually doing anything, since the invention of the new government BLS math BS to replace the old government BLS math BS makes job creation obsolete. That's just perfect for the Democrats.

Last month when I wrote about the BS the BLS now uses to make unemployment go down, I did the math myself. This time around, I’m letting the folks from ZeroHedge and our contributor Mike Shedlock, do the math for me.

ZeroHedge says that if you add back in the 5 million people who have permanently dropped out the labor force, as reflected in the historical average workforce participations rates, the “implied” unemployment rate is 11.5 percent and rising, not

Workforce participation rates imply an 11.5 percent unemployment rate, while the "official" BLS rate says unemployment is going down. Typical liberal math.     

“It also means that the spread between the reported and implied unemployment rate just soared to a fresh 30 year high of 3.2%,” ZH say. “And that is how with a calculator and just one minute of math, one strips away countless hours of BLS propaganda.”

Last month ZeroHedge reported that the spread between the reported and implied unemployment rate was at 2.9 percent, then “the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.”

Indeed, that’s how the story gets worse from here.

ZeroHedge used the historical workforce participation rates to estimate the workforce, but as our own Mike Shedlock points out, participation rates have declined again “taking out a 1984 low.”

Instead of the historic rate of 65.8 percent participation in the workforce, we are now at 63.7 percent. That means that we are literally years away from replacing jobs that we’ve lost since Obama became president. So many have lost heart looking for work that it’s going to be some time before they become candidates for employment again.

One of the few Wall Street economists who sees this is Lindsey Piegza, of FTN Financial in New York.

“It was a better-than-expected report, the strongest report that we've seen in quite some time,” Piegza told Reuters. “The big question is -- here's the thing: the reason we're seeing the unemployment rate drop is because more and more people are dropping out of the labor force. I know the market wants to rally on this number but remember we need a minimum of 250,000 just to cover demographic change. So we're almost at the place where we need to be to reabsorb the nine million people who lost their jobs during the Great Recession. This pushes the bar even higher for payrolls for the rest of this year. Given that the bar is so low we have to take this in the context that it's still not good enough."

As Piegza and others have pointed out, the 243,000 jobs that were reported aren’t enough to keep up with the number of people joining the labor force, yet alone, those who have lost their jobs.

“People should take it with a grain of salt,” Scott Brown, an economist with Raymond James and Associates of Saint Petersburg, FL, also told Reuters “since they are January figures and subject to revisions. We also had some unusually mild weather.”

In the end what it means is that wages in the US have been permanently reduced by $208 billion per year and counting so far. That’s about 1.5 percent of GDP just in wages, not counting anything that is actually produced by those workers. When you figure in total output subtracted from GDP from missing workers, the number is closer to 2.1 percent of GDP that’s permanently missing from our economy. That’s about $320 billion.

Even the most optimistic projections for Obama’s millionaires’ tax doesn’t come close to raising that amount.  

Over the long-term those little variations of 2 percent more or less in GDP growth make a huge difference in our economy.  Over a ten-year period an economy that grows by 2 percent versus an economy that grows by 4 percent is the difference between having a GDP of $18.5 trillion versus a GDP of $22.5 trillion by year ten.

In total over ten years, it means that the economy will miss about $20 trillion worth of GDP in those ten years, and between $3.4-$4 trillion in tax revenues unless we start to follow pro-growth policies that lead to job creation for someone other than major Obama donors.

See? And here I ended up doing some math anyway.

That’s just another reason to deny Obama four more years.

Now I have 20 trillion reasons plus one. And so do you.

[siboneyes]

The Cost of Obama Jeffrey H. Anderson

February 14, 2012

President Obama’s fourth budget has now been released, which allows for a relatively full accounting of deficit spending during his four years in office. The picture isn’t pretty, but it is revealing.

According to the White House’s own figures (see table S-1 here for 2011 to 2013, and table S-1 here for 2010), the actual or projected deficit tallies for the four years in which Obama has submitted budgets are as follows: $1.293 trillion in 2010, $1.300 trillion in 2011, $1.327 trillion in 2012, and $901 billion in 2013. In addition, Obama is responsible for the estimated $200 billion (the Congressional Budget Office’s figure) that his economic “stimulus” added to the deficit in 2009. Moreover, he shouldn’t get credit for the $149 billion in TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) repayments made in 2010 and 2011 to cover most of the $154 billion in bank loans that remained unpaid at the end of the 2009 fiscal year — loans that count against President Bush’s 2009 deficit tally.

Adding all of this up, deficit spending during Obama’s four years in the White House (based on his own figures) will be an estimated $5.170 trillion — or $5,170,000,000,000.00.

To help put that colossal sum of money into perspective, if you take our deficit spending under Obama and divide it evenly among the roughly 300 million American citizens, that works out to just over $17,000 per person — or about $70,000 for a family of four.

The previous record for most deficit spending during a presidency was set by President George W. Bush (see table 1.3 in the White House’s Historic Tables). During Bush’s 8-year administration, total deficit spending was $3.402 trillion. That’s a truly extraordinary and reckless sum. It’s also $1.768 trillion less than deficit spending in just four years under Obama. Per year, deficits under Bush averaged $425 billion. Per year, deficits under Obama (according to his own numbers) will average $1.293 trillion — or more than three times as much.

Because the gross domestic product (GDP) nearly always grows from year to year, the most favorable way to view Obama’s deficit spending is as a percentage of GDP. Surely he can’t look as bad in that light, right?

Well, prior to Obama, our annual deficit spending had only exceeded 6.0 percent of GDP during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Except during those huge conflicts, our deficits had never exceeded 6.0 percent of GDP in any year — not during the Great Depression, not at the height of the Cold War defense buildup, not ever. But that’s no longer the case. During Obama’s four years in the White House (and, again, using his own numbers), annual deficit spending will average 8.4 percent of GDP.

That’s nearly double the average annual level of deficit spending under any other post-War president. As the following chart shows, this has truly been a historic presidency — more profligate than any other by far:

[siboneyes]

EDITORIAL: Note to Obama: Unemployment is up

The real U.S. jobless rate is 15 percent

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

2,22, 2012

The Obama administration keeps reporting supposed good news on the employment front. Americans sense that something is not quite right about the rosy official numbers, and a series of independent reports confirms their skepticism.

On Feb. 16, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report on long-term unemployment showing that the past three years have witnessed "the longest stretch of high unemployment in this country since the Great Depression." The report observes that if the underemployed had not been excluded from official statistics, "the unemployment rate in January 2012 would have been about 15 percent." The "share of unemployed people looking for work for more than six months," i.e. the long-term unemployed, has been above 40 percent since December 2009, the highest level since these data have been collected.

One reason for the persistence of long-term unemployment is that people are eligible for unemployment benefits far longer than before the recession. White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett helpfully reminded America that the Obama administration sees this as a net positive. "People who receive that unemployment check go out and spend it and help stimulate the economy, so that's healthy as well," she said Tuesday. Having record numbers of Americans on food stamps is also a form of economic stimulus, according to Secretary of Agriculture Thomas J. Vilsack. The administration is trying to make a virtue of these grim economic necessities.

Those who run out their unemployment benefits are increasingly seeking other forms of "stimulus." A new report from JPMorgan Chase shows that Social Security disability claims have risen to a record $200 billion a year, with 5.3 percent of the working-age population claiming some form of federal disability payment. Mental-illness claims have particularly increased, which is a metric the White House would rather ignore.

The most sobering reality check comes from Gallup, which reports a daily, non-seasonally-adjusted 30-day rolling average unemployment figure. Lately, these numbers have not been telling a story the White House wants to hear. The official, adjusted numbers show monthly declines in unemployment from 9.1 percent in August 2011 to 8.3 percent in January 2012. However, the Gallup daily figures show unemployment dropping from 9 percent in mid-August to 8.2 percent at the end of October, floating up to 8.7 percent in November, dropping to 8.2 percent in early January and then pushing back up to 9 percent in the past five weeks. Gallup's measure of underemployment has been tracking generally upward since August, from 17.5 percent to around 19 percent.

One reason for the disconnect between official and independent statistics is that the Labor Department has been gradually trimming the percentage of people it counts as officially part of the labor force. This number has shrunk from 65.7 percent to 63.7 percent since Mr. Obama took office. So while earlier this month the White House highlighted the news that January payrolls had risen by 243,000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics quietly dropped 1.2 million from the calculated workforce. Ejecting people from the labor pool makes it easy for the Obama administration to keep reporting favorable unemployment numbers. The food-stamp nation knows better.

The Washington Times