Less than two days after Romney complained that unemployment hadn’t dropped below 8% during Obama’s administration, the unemployment rate fell from 8.1% to 7.8%. So when Romney was saying that, unemployment was already below 8%.
So of course, the Republicans respond by accusing the president of cooking the books, calling the unemployment numbers “total pro-Obama propaganda” and saying that Obama “can’t debate so change numbers”.
They do the same thing when polls show Obama ahead. Reality doesn’t matter to them anymore.
UPDATE: A former director of the Congressional Budget Office (and advisor to John McCain) and the chief economist at Moody’s analytics looked at the unemployment numbers and declare them valid.
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Of course when Bush released those Obama tapes the weekend of the election, it had nothing to do with the election and everything to do with protecting the US.
Osama?
idk, I dislike many republicans as much as the next smart person, but this screams fishy to me
Loved Chris Matthew’s confrontation of (former GE CEO) Jack Welch over Welch’s complete lack of evidence in his conspiracy claims that the jobs numbers were skewed. Of course, in true rightie fashion, Welch, while admitting he had NO evidence, refused to do so. And NO one on the right has questioned him!
See the actual video footage: “Do You Want to Take That back?” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/chris-matthews-jack-welch_n_1943972.html
A fuller explanation of just WHY the jobs-truthers’ claims are baseless (Doubters, it would be nice, if you would hold on a moment, and just read this, before you react!): http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/jobs-report-conspiracy-theory-baseless_n_1942685.html
It’s not that hard to understand the numbers, which are valid. The largest impact is college students who are in the workforce during the summer but leave the workforce in September – hardly a difficult thing to grasp.
But the bottom line is if Obama was personally saving children from a burning building, Republicans would accuse him of hating business by letting their buildings person without raising a hand to stop it.
The unemployment numbers dipped because many people left the work force (stopped looking for jobs), but more importantly more people (600,000) who wanted full-time jobs took part-time jobs to make ends meet. So they are not considered unemployed using this measure (“official” unemployment rate)–the same measure by which past presidents have been judged BTW. The U6 which does count people who are employed part time but want full time work and which dropped by 0.3 %-age points in Aug. is unchanged for Sept. For Republicans, any bad economic news is good news for them, which is why they refuse to pass any job bills.
PTG, you are repeating a Republican talking point. Do you have any evidence to back up the claim that the unemployment numbers dipped because people stopped looking for jobs?
According to the report, the number dropped as much as it did because the numbers from July and August were revised based on new data, which showed that 873,000 more people had jobs. NOT because people stopped looking.
It just doesn’t seem logical and therefore skepticism is the natural response. We have to add 150,000 new jobs every month just to keep pace with the population growth. Anything less then that puts us in the negative, anythng above that is positive. Now I haven’t seen too many, if any monthly job reports that indicate any numbers that have remained above 150,000 for more then 1-2 months and not much over 150,000 if they were. When you stop counting people who stop looking it also skewers the results. I doubt if either side knows what the actual numbers are.
It just seems a tad timely for this report and if the parties were reversed I think we would be equally skeptical. I am not saying the books are cooked, I have no evidence of that. It just highly coincidental and that raises my spidey sense. I truly hope that close to a million people have found decent full time work as that would be a blessing.
PSGT – if age and retirement was perfectly evenly distributed, you would be right. But it isn’t. More population grwoth occurs right nnow at the very young end, there was a dip in the 80’s and 90’s. More baby boomers are retiring.
And most importantly, there was additional growth in July and August that was updated as well as students leaving the work force for college in September, and the combination of all of the above makes the difference.
Of course this is only one measure, and actual job growth is still anemic, and unemployment too high. But the right question is what would Romney do differently (and would it be better) and the answer is a resounding “Bad things” and “No”.
PSGT: And 1M new jobs for a 0.3% change assumes a workforce of 333M people which is of course ludicrous. The work force and the total population of the US are very different numbers – which you should already know.
I have long suspected that the high unemployment numbers were just manipulated statistics by the Republicans and the Illuminati to make the resident Democrats look bad.
For a while I thought I might be psychotic, but now I realize that my response is nothing more than a healthy, natural skepticism. Lucky me!