Kathianne
03-14-2010, 01:38 AM
From everything I can tell in Illinois, things are not improving economically, they continue to deteriorate at an accelerating rate. It seems it's not just here:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/jobs-false-improvement-proposed-destruction/?singlepage=true
Jobs: False ‘Improvement,’ Proposed Destruction
Posted By Tom Blumer On March 13, 2010 @ 12:20 am
Remember when our president was telling us that his number one focus would be Joe Biden’s favorite three-letter word (“J-O-B-S, jobs [1]!”)? It’s hard to believe, but it was only six weeks ago [2] (“Obama to recast agenda to focus on jobs, deficit”) at the State of the Union address.
True to his word (not), it’s been virtually all health care, all the time since, including a new wrinkle that would seriously cripple the employment market.
The president’s reaction to more bad employment news [3] on March 5 was to resort to happy talk [4], while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid instead chose crazy talk [5]:
Today was a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good...
Harry Reid could have tried to tell us how great February’s NSA 473,000-job pickup was. In context, it wasn’t that great at all. In fact, as you can see above, it came in lower than February 2008, when the people at the National Bureau of Economic Research say we were in the third month of an economic recession as they define it [7] (as normal people define it [8], the recession didn’t begin until the third quarter of 2008). Moreover, it was 241,000 jobs lower than the February 2004-2008 average. If the employment situation were really in recovery in February, that difference would have been almost zero. Beyond that, February’s actual result using this metric was far worse than January’s, when the result only trailed the January 2004-2008 average by 72,000.
This isn’t an improvement; it’s a serious deterioration.
The only reason February’s SA number of -36,000 came in as low as it did (but still worse than January’s) is that the SA calculation took February 2009’s free-fall result into account, making it a statistically correct result that confuses more than it enlightens. Further evidence supporting that point is that the SA result for February 2010 is better than February 2008, which as already shown based on what really happened, doesn’t reflect the underlying reality...
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/jobs-false-improvement-proposed-destruction/?singlepage=true
Jobs: False ‘Improvement,’ Proposed Destruction
Posted By Tom Blumer On March 13, 2010 @ 12:20 am
Remember when our president was telling us that his number one focus would be Joe Biden’s favorite three-letter word (“J-O-B-S, jobs [1]!”)? It’s hard to believe, but it was only six weeks ago [2] (“Obama to recast agenda to focus on jobs, deficit”) at the State of the Union address.
True to his word (not), it’s been virtually all health care, all the time since, including a new wrinkle that would seriously cripple the employment market.
The president’s reaction to more bad employment news [3] on March 5 was to resort to happy talk [4], while Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid instead chose crazy talk [5]:
Today was a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good...
Harry Reid could have tried to tell us how great February’s NSA 473,000-job pickup was. In context, it wasn’t that great at all. In fact, as you can see above, it came in lower than February 2008, when the people at the National Bureau of Economic Research say we were in the third month of an economic recession as they define it [7] (as normal people define it [8], the recession didn’t begin until the third quarter of 2008). Moreover, it was 241,000 jobs lower than the February 2004-2008 average. If the employment situation were really in recovery in February, that difference would have been almost zero. Beyond that, February’s actual result using this metric was far worse than January’s, when the result only trailed the January 2004-2008 average by 72,000.
This isn’t an improvement; it’s a serious deterioration.
The only reason February’s SA number of -36,000 came in as low as it did (but still worse than January’s) is that the SA calculation took February 2009’s free-fall result into account, making it a statistically correct result that confuses more than it enlightens. Further evidence supporting that point is that the SA result for February 2010 is better than February 2008, which as already shown based on what really happened, doesn’t reflect the underlying reality...