Friday, June 04, 2010

A First Comment On The Employment Numbers
To establish the numbers themselves, allow me to indulge in a bit of snippage from the Christian Science Monitor:
On Friday, in a disappointing report, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the economy gained 431,000 jobs and the unemployment rate slipped to 9.7 percent, down from 9.9 percent in April. The unemployment rate fell because there were fewer people looking for work, not because there was a jump in employment – private sector businesses added only 41,000 jobs last month, far fewer than economists had expected.
What I've been hearing on the radio news is how these are the "best numbers in ten years." Well, according to the reports on the details of the numbers, the vast majority of those 400,000 government jobs are Census hires. So the "best numbers in ten years" would go back to the last census enumeration which would be, let's see ten years ago? D'ya see a pattern here? The vaunted mainstream media doesn't seem to.
The upcoming post on these numbers will feature a Beavis and Butthead link (I can't find it as an embed). That's a first for PoW I think.

1 comment:

Phillymon said...

Definitely the Beavis Obama and Butthead Bernanke economy.

If government hiring is counted as jobs gained, then they should go all in. Beavis should hire *everybody*, and pay them a nice living wage, say $100/hour. See... 0 percent employment, and everybody is rich! What could possibly be wrong with that?