Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Rick's had enough

Apparently the unemployment numbers published before the 2012 Presidential election might have been cooked.  Rick Santelli had enough and said a few things this morning on CNBC:




The Huffington Post offered this rebuttal:

New York Post columnist John Crudele, citing one anonymous source, claims that Census Bureau employees have been ordered to make up responses when surveying households for the Labor Department's monthly unemployment report. Crudele claims to have evidence from 2010 that one Census survey-taker was caught making up numbers to meet a quota. Crudele's anonymous source claims there were other incidents of surveyors making up numbers, that Census officials encouraged such shenanigans, and that fake-number generation ramped up ahead of the 2012 election.....

Obviously, if the Census Bureau is telling employees to make up numbers one way or another, that's a problem. Neither the Census Bureau nor the Labor Department had anything interesting to say about Crudele's report when contacted by The Huffington Post, although a Labor Department spokesman said the Commerce Department was investigating the claims. The Census Bureau, which is a part of the Commerce Department, did not confirm or deny that statement.

Still, it's not possible for one employee alone, or even a few, to have altered the unemployment rate by submitting false data -- Census surveys 60,000 households in one week, a massive task involving about 2,200 workers. That makes a rate-moving conspiracy highly unlikely.

"This fraud would have to be so widespread, to affect enough of the survey takers to affect the top-line numbers, that it seems implausible on the face of it," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist who studies unemployment at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.

The 0.3-percent decline in unemployment in September 2012 was not an unusually large change, Shierholz pointed out -- the unemployment rate tends to be volatile. Unemployment also fell by 0.3 percent in November 2011, less than a year earlier. September's drop, though large, was not out of line with the overall trend in unemployment, which has continued to decline steadily, if slowly, in the year since the election.

And cooked or raw, these monthly jobs numbers aren't precise measures, anyway. The Labor Department says it has 90 percent confidence them. That means a reported 6 percent unemployment rate might really be 5.8 percent, or it might be 6.2 percent. For an 8 percent unemployment rate, the variation would be slightly wider.

In fact, if Obama really is cooking the unemployment numbers, he needs to send them back to the kitchen -- this has been the slowest job-market recovery since World War II. One month's unemployment report did not change that.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Implausible is a rather kind way to say that Rick is either a fool, has lost his mind or is deliberately lying.

The only " news" in this story is that news no longer based factual accuracy but is for entertainment purposes only.

This is particularly disturbing given the stories this week about how responsibly the JFK assassination was covered and how important it was to the media of that time to be sure of the accuracy of their reporting.

Now, entertainment rather than news is what we get and the town idiot gets a platform instead of being ignored.









Anonymous said...

Santelli didn't invent this; he reported John Crudele's story in the Post. FWIW, I thought they were lying the second I heard the unemployment rate finally dropped below 8%, conveniently just before the election.

As far as the accuracy of reportage on the Kennedy assasination - apparently your planet doesn't have the hundreds of books that have been published pointing out all the contradictions in the reporting and the official statements about the probe. I DO think, however, more of the media at least tried to be accurate back then.

Anonymous said...

Implausible my ass. Cooking these numbers has been standard practice for forty years, just not at the current and recent level. There's no shame in it now.

These numbers have always had a shallow basis in fact, were based primarily on theory, smoke & mirrors, guestimates, speculation and forcasts followed by revision to sort of wisk a limb of leaves over the dusty trail so it can't be followed.

Anonymous said...

Unemployment is dropping, inflation is almost zero and you can keep your existing health insurance policy.Lies used by the Obama political machine in the last presidential election.Over 500 books have been written about various conspiracies to have JFK assassinated for many reasons by different groups. The majority of Americans never believed Oswald was in this by himself. The Warren Report was more of a cover up than a believable explanation.

Anonymous said...

9:11 The Warren Report was not "the press" though. I think the reporters did try to be accurate then, even when all they could find turned out to be bogus.

Now we get asshats like Martin Bashir.......

Kingfish said...

I guess jack Welch is stupid

LOOK! Over There... said...

So, while 9:11 distracts us with events of fifty years ago and Obama's handlers turn our attention to Iran we march blindly toward our doomsday. And while the child watches the doctor's finger-puppet, he barely feels the needle.

Anonymous said...

KF, wanted to send you word that there is a city wide boil water notice for Jackson. WAPT has info. JJ reaches so many, thought it would be helpful to folks.

Anonymous said...

7:34 = troll

Anonymous said...

How's does one define or meet the definition of troll on a board full of anonymous posters, most of whom disagree with each other and attempt to incite?

Anonymous said...

Mr. Santelli is an entertainer out to boost his ratings. No legitimate media person reports such a wild, obviously false conspiracy theory based on one anonymous source.

What bogus theory will we get next, one from The Drudge Report? KF, I will say you did the right thing by publishing the Huffington report calling BS on Santelli's fictional "reporting."

Anonymous said...

It's one thing to change how unemployment stats are reported and another to deliberately change the data collected.

HOW the stats are reported hasn't changed for decades. Unemployment has been under-reported for a long time.

The books aren't " cooked" when the data is accurately entered into the system.

The accusation is that the data wasn't accurately entered and those who gather and enter the data are part of a huge conspiracy.

Statistics should be required in high school!

Anonymous said...

Take a pill. Fewer people watch CNBC that are signed up for Obamacare.



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