Folks talk a lot (well, not so much Democrats) about how the unemployment rate is dropping only because participation in the labor pool is falling. All true. But go a bit deeper inside the numbers and see that most of the 115,000 jobs allegedly "created" in April of 2012 were really just "assumed to be created", and a large number of them only exist as figments of the Labor Department's imagination.
John Crudele, writing in the New York Post:
... that 115,000 figure was achieved only through alchemy. The Labor Department assumed that 172,000 jobs were created by nascent businesses that couldn’t actually be surveyed. Without that questionable premise — which is added to the figures before seasonal adjustments — headline growth would probably have come in under 100,000.
Look at just one of the hypotheticals and you’ll see how screwy these numbers really are.
The Labor Department guessed that 72,000 jobs were created by brand-new companies in the leisure and hospitality industry. But even with those guesstimates, the final figure adds up to only 12,000 new jobs. Without the guesstimate, there would have been a loss of jobs in the industry.
The Labor Department needed to assume that 72,000 jobs were being created by new, invisible companies just to get overall job growth in leisure and hospitality up to 12,000 in April.
Pretty bizarre, no?
There was more bad news hidden in Friday’s announcement that people didn’t catch on to. The seasonal adjustments were changed from the prior year, and this helped the April number look stronger than it really was. And in the separate household survey — from which the unemployment rate is derived — there were 169,000 fewer jobs reported in April than in March. The unemployment rate declined only because people reported leaving the workforce at a faster pace than jobs were disappearing...
Eventually, there will be 500 people left in the workplace, and only 500 jobs available, and Obama and the Democrats will proudly claim their economic program has brought us to 100% employment for the first time in history.. Of course, American society will have collapsed long before them, but the Left will dance in the ashes of their final "triumph".
And it is no wonder they feel it is inevitable. The figures are twisted into pretzels, and the media smirks, turns away, and speaks in breathless tones about how cool our black president is...
