Jobs Report: Cooked or Correct?

The jobs numbers, unquestionably, gave a boost to the Obama campaign, still reeling from the president’s poor debate performance. While the bureau’s survey of businesses showed a ho-hum rise of 114,000 in nonfarm employment, the unemployment rate had somehow dropped from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent, far exceeding expectations. Thus, a month before the election, and for the first time in Obama’s presidency, unemployment was under 8 percent.

Welch smelled conspiracy. And he wasn’t alone. “Total data manipulation,” tweeted a writer at Zerohedge, a financial news blog. “Such a farce.” Fox News spent much of Friday morning piling on.

It’s worth pointing out that the last time anyone accused the Bureau of Labor Statistics of being politically motivated was when Richard Nixon did so in 1971. Upset that the bureau was releasing figures showing higher unemployment during his re-election campaign, he asked his hatchet man, Charles Colson, to investigate the bureau’s top officials, including its chief, Geoffrey Moore.

So Point No. 1: the idea that a handful of career bureaucrats, their jobs secure no matter who is in the White House, would manipulate the unemployment data to help President Obama, is ludicrous. Jack Welch knows it, too; when I called him Friday afternoon, he quickly backpedaled. “I’m not accusing anybody of anything,” he protested. But he went on to add that everything he’s seen suggests that the economy remains in the doldrums, and it just didn’t seem possible that the unemployment rate could have dropped so drastically, and so quickly.

Hence, Point No. 2: there is, indeed, something a little strange about the way the country derives its employment statistics. It turns out that the statistics the bureau releases each month are generated by two different reports. One, called the establishment report, is a survey of businesses. That’s where the 114,000 additional jobs comes from.

The second is a survey of 55,000 households, where people are asked about their employment status. Extrapolating from the survey, the bureau concluded that an additional 873,000 people had found work in September. It is that number that brought the unemployment rate from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent.

When I asked a bureau spokeswoman why there was such divergence between the two numbers, she said she had no idea. “The reports are totally separate,” she said.

When I put the same question to economists, they shrugged. Maybe it was because an additional 582,000 Americans were working part time, which doesn’t show up in payroll statistics. Maybe it was because of increased government employment. For some unexplained reason, there is always an uptick in September. (“Maybe it has something to do with going back to school,” said Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, who quickly added, “I’m just guessing here.”) In any case, it wasn’t anything economists hadn’t seen before. Sometimes the two surveys delink, though over the long term they tend to reinforce each other. In the short term, however, the household survey is considered the more volatile — and less reliable — of the two numbers.

Which leads to Point No. 3: there is something truly absurd about having the presidential race hinge on the unemployment rate. Even putting aside the reliability of the short-term numbers, the harsh reality is that no president has much control over the economy. That is especially true of President Obama, whose every effort to boost the economy these past two years has been stymied by Republicans. Again and again, they have shown that they would rather see the country suffer than do anything that might help Obama’s re-election.

There is rough justice in the way things are playing out. Having spent the last year wrongly blaming the president for high unemployment, Republicans can only stand by helplessly as the unemployment rate goes down at the worst possible moment for them. Fox News scoured the data Friday, looking for signs that the economy wasn’t improving. They found some: high unemployment for African-Americans, for instance, and fewer manufacturing jobs.

But the data were largely overwhelmed by positive signals. In its revised figures for July and August, for instance, the bureau said that more jobs had been created than it originally estimated. People with only high school degrees were finding jobs. The number of people who had been out of work for six months or more was at its lowest point in three years.

Whether the Republicans like it or not, the economy is slowly getting better.

Awful, isn’t it?

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 8, 2012

An earlier version of this column misidentified the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1971. It was Geoffrey Moore, not Julius Shiskin.

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Jobs report, consumer agency on tap for Obama (AP)

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama plans to visit the offices of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday, just two days after defying Senate Republicans and appointing a new head to the watchdog agency.

The president will drop by the bureau just hours after the government announces unemployment figures for December. A mix of private and government data on Thursday prompted new optimism about a rebounding jobs market.

If Friday's jobs report shows improvement over the 8.6 percent unemployment rate registered in November, Obama would have an opportunity to talk up his economic policies while casting himself as a protector of consumers. A rise in joblessness would complicate the president's message.

Obama on Wednesday named Richard Cordray to lead the consumer bureau, using a Senate recess to circumvent Republican opposition.

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Santorum shrugs off report of Iowa vote errors (AP)

DES MOINES, Iowa – Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum shrugged off reports late Thursday that the vote count from Iowa's caucuses might be wrong, saying the errors appear not to change the fact that he and Mitt Romney were nearly tied.

Santorum told Fox News that Iowa's Republican Party chairman, Matt Strawn, informed him of two cases in which errors were reported in the count from Tuesday night. Taken together, Santorum said, the changes would almost cancel out each other and that Romney would win by nine votes instead of eight.

"That doesn't really matter to me," he said. "This was a tie."

Strawn said in a statement that party officials would not respond to "every rumor, innuendo or allegation" as it certifies results during a two-week certification process. Romney and Santorum each had just over 30,000 votes out of more than 122,000 votes cast.

Strawn said state party officials had been in contact with GOP officials in Appanoose County but that officials "do not have any reason to believe the final, certified results of Appanoose County will change the outcome of Tuesday's vote."

Des Moines TV station KCCI reported that a Ron Paul backer attending his first precinct caucuses in Appanoose County, in southern Iowa, said the vote from his precinct was inaccurately reported and gave Romney 20 more votes than he actually received.

The Paul supporter, Edward True of Moulton, told The Associated Press that he helped count the ballots cast at his precinct caucuses and that Romney received two votes. True said he was shocked to see the official results on the Republican Party website showed Romney with 22 votes in the precinct.

"I assume somebody made a typographical error," he said in a telephone interview.

True said that when he contacted local Republican officials, "They said they would sort it out in the next couple of weeks, but how many primaries will have happened by that time?"

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GOP says weak job report means no tax hikes (AP)

WASHINGTON – Top congressional Republicans said Friday that a report that few new jobs were created last month shows this is not the time for the government to be raising taxes. But the GOP House speaker said the gloomy numbers also underscored the need for a deal on raising the federal debt limit and cutting massive budget deficits.

With the Obama administration and Congress looking for a compromise to end their standoff over government debt, House GOP leaders used the latest jobs reports to drive home their position on taxes.

"The situation that we face is pretty urgent, as a matter of fact I would describe it as dire," House Speaker John Boehner said at a news conference, emphasizing that "a debt limit increase that raises taxes or fails to make serious spending cuts won't pass the House."

He was backed up by Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who said that deficit reduction talks held by Vice President Joe Biden that Cantor abandoned had ended because Democrats were insisting on raising taxes.

"Now it just does not make sense for Americans to suffer under higher taxes in an economy like this," said Cantor, R-Va.

Obama has insisted that some revenue increases be included in a deficit-reduction plan.

Boehner, R-Ohio, also stressed the need to reach a deal before the government starts defaulting on its debt on Aug. 2.

"I frankly think it puts us in an awful lot of jeopardy and puts our economy in jeopardy, risking even more jobs. So I believe it is important that we come to an agreement," he said.

The Labor Department said Friday that the economy added only 18,000 jobs last month. The unemployment rate ticked up slightly to 9.2 percent.

Boehner said congressional leaders and President Barack Obama were not near a debt limit agreement.

"I don't think this problem has narrowed at all in the last several days," he said.

After Obama met with congressional leaders Thursday at the White House, Obama said the session had been constructive. The talks are to resume at the White House on Sunday.

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