Bush Plans to Cook Employment Numbers

[Triana]

A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Vern Stevens

Bush plans on increasing the employment numbers by cooking the books of the Labor Dept. over the next few months according to the New York Times.

See article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/business/12jobs.html

About half way through the article is the following statement:

"The assumption of a shortfall in the payroll survey is based on the view that the labor statistics bureau has not yet updated its formula for using net job changes at the 400,000 representative companies in its survey to project job changes at the 8.5 million corporations across America.

The expectation is that the recovery, particularly the strong economic growth in the third quarter, has stepped up job creation at existing companies while also creating jobs at new companies not yet counted by the government. As the bureau gradually updates its survey early this year, the 30,000 to 60,000 not-yet-detected jobs presumably will show up in the monthly employment reports."

It appears that our jobless recovery will suddenly, just before the election, find a lot more jobs. Pretty convenient!

[lovedems]

1. They can cook the books all they want. Everyone I know

and I mean everyone, says "what recovery". I think we have all learned over the last 3 years, just because the say it, doesn't make is so.

This will just further dampen their credibility issue.

[yellowcanine]

2. A (real) job in the hand is worth 1000 (fake) jobs in the Bush

Yeah, that's the ticket. All those folks without jobs are going to feel much better knowing that the official guvmint statistics show that they really do have a job.

[tom_paine]

3. They've already been doing that

The pronouncements of the Imperial Amerikan Givernment must be viewed with the same skepticism as a 1978 Soviet Agriculture Report.

No more, no less. Both are equally dishonest, though the Soviets did not have the marketing skills to make their lies so palatable and psychoengineered.

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. Why doesn't he just include the number of jobs he's created over-seas?

You know Rove will think of a way of padding the number by including the jobs he's created overseas.

[madrchsod]

5. cooking books???

how about what happened in my town. a large battery company moved to town and created 350= jobs. good news for us but bad news for the people who lost their jobs when the plant moved here. there were over 3500 people applied for those 350+ jobs. so much for creating new jobs. there`s over 5 thousand people unemployed in the surrounding counties.
if there are job openings in manufacturing it`s for 2 or 3 people. lots of nursing jobs,probaly 20 to 30 in this area and there`s such a shortage that the bigger med centers are going overseas to recruit nurses