What's It Worth?

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Conservative Byt Don’t ask me about seasonal adjustment. I’ve been trying to figure this out all

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Conservative Byt

Don’t ask me about seasonal adjustment. I’ve been trying to figure
this out all morning, and I can’t. But the raw numbers, 130 million
jobs in December, 128 million jobs in January, give or take a couple
hundred thousand either side. But when the seasonal adjustments take
place, there is a gain of 200, whatever they’re reporting, 33,000 jobs.
Now, what’s happening is the labor force is shrinking. There are fewer
jobs. Even the Drive-Bys, so excited, they can’t wait to report the
good news, but even they are reporting that the labor force
participation rate, number of jobs out there, is continuing to dwindle,
and most of the jobs being created are low wage.

But none of that’s gonna matter. None of it’s gonna matter. I don’t
want to be an “I told you so,” but way back last year, even recently
toward the end of last year, this being an election
year, I predicted. But you knew. You knew what was gonna happen when
this year started. You knew that the statistics are that no president
has ever been reelected when the unemployment rate’s over 8%. So guess
what it’s gonna be by the time we get to Election Day? It’s just that
simple.

I’m trying to get to the bottom of this, this seasonal adjustment
business. Stick with me on this, folks. From the Bureau of Labor
Statistics: “What is seasonal adjustment? Seasonal adjustment is a
statistical technique that attempts to measure and remove the influences
of predictable seasonal patterns to reveal how employment and
unemployment change from month to month. Over the course of a year, the
size of the labor force, the levels of employment and unemployment, and
other measures of labor market activity undergo fluctuations due to
seasonal events including changes in weather, harvests, major holidays,
and school schedules. Because these seasonal events follow a more or
less regular pattern each year, their influence on statistical trends
can be eliminated by seasonally adjusting the statistics from month to
month.”

So seasonal adjustment includes adjustment for the size of the labor
force. I didn’t know that. Seasonal adjustment is not just what the
guess is about the number of jobs from month to month. It also includes
adjustment for the size of the labor force. And that’s how they’re
able to play games with the labor force participation rate. So that
might account for a big chunk of the difference here. One-point-two
million — and this is their number — from December to January, 1.2
million people left the workforce, just left it. That’s the labor force
participation rate, and they left. That’s half the number, or half the
difference right there. If you take the number 132.9 jobs in
December, 130.4 million in January, that’s 2.5 million fewer jobs, 1.2
million, about half of that that they just threw out in a seasonal
adjustment of people that left the workforce.

I don’t know how they get the 1.2 million. They say it’s
statistical. But what they did is reduce the overall number of jobs
possible by 1.2 million. So fewer jobs is gonna bring down the
unemployment rate because… If the labor force were what it is, or what
it was when Obama was inaugurated 2009, the unemployment rate would be
close to 10%. It’s only 8.3 because they have used seasonal adjustment
to just say that last month, 1.2 million people gone from the workforce.
No jobs anymore.

So the Bureau of Labor Statistics looks at the loss of 2.5 million
jobs, and they say, “Well, we think 1.2 million have just decided to
give up looking for work
so we won’t count half of them, just to make things more accurate.”
And even with that major cheat, that still leaves more than a
million-and-a-half lost jobs unaccounted for. Fewer people looking for
jobs brings down the jobless rate. In this case, not more people
finding jobs brings down the jobless rate. Fewer people looking for
jobs is what’s bringing the unemployment rate down. There isn’t job
creation going on. Not to the tune the regime wants you to believe it.
It just isn’t happening.