Non-seasonally adjusted jobs numbers and Obama bringing census under his control.

[KarlJay]

I'm trying to confirm a claim made on Friday Aug 5, 2016 concerning the job numbers report.  The Tom Sullivan show (http://radio.foxnews.com/fox-news-talk/tom-sullivan/), claimed that if we didn't seasonally adjust the numbers, we'd be at zero job growth.

 

I did a search and came across this:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillmatthews/2014/04/21/if-the-facts-dont-fit-change-the-facts-how-the-obama-administration-undercuts-public-confidence-in-government-statistics/#2dd103d72531

 

About how Obama has been playing with the numbers.

 

What Tom Sullivan said during his 3rd hour was that if the numbers were NOT seasonally adjusted, we'd have no job growth.

 

I know the GDP is very slow, but I thought we were at least creating jobs.

 

Q. Can someone explain in simple terms what effect seasonally adjusting the numbers means?

 

Thank You, KarlJay.

[thebeardslastcall]

You want someone to explain how the government cooks their books to make themselves look good?

Also don't forget you constantly have younger people entering the workforce and older people exiting the workforce and thus with an increasing population size you need some job creation just to maintain a certain percentage of workforce participation. Also of note is "jobs" is often an intentionally binary measure and generally fails to properly take into account quality, hours, and pay of the jobs. Two crappy part-time jobs is not better than one good full-time job, but they'll pretend that is the case. Government unemployment numbers are also pretty deceptive. Best not to waste your time using government stats as any good indicators of what is actually happening in the market as they're not likely to give a honest accounting.

 

With all that said, whether or not more or less jobs happen to be created is somewhat irrelevant to the fact the market is being corrupted and whatever the numbers are, we could be doing better were they not unjustly interfering with the market and "good job growth" does nothing to change the corruption of the market and would only serve to hide we could be having "great job growth" without their violent meddling. Let's not focus on the absolute value, when the relative value is far more important.

And to marginally address your question, certain industries hire and fire people for seasonal employment, like a retailer hiring more sales associates for their store during the Christmas season and then firing them in the first quarter of the year. They take this standard cyclic behavior of certain employers as an opportunity to mess with the numbers some more.

[shirgall]

A good place to start at looking beneath the numbers: http://www.shadowstats.com/

[AccuTron]

Thanks for the OP link.

 

Looking at Shirgall's link now....

[shirgall]

Shall we add wages to the mix? http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-10/inconvenient-jobs-revisions-obama

[thebeardslastcall]

Maybe Stefan could do a video splicing together a video of Obama's lies with actual numbers to show how his "inconvenient truths" are more lies and deceptions as to the actual state of affairs of the nation. Little fair use of the lies combined with some econ education could be usefully educational and entertaining for the masses. Stefan's team is also good with having sources, so they can back up their numbers versus a mere off the cuff remark denouncing the lies without the backing power of accurate numbers people can use to give extra credibility to his statements versus standard commentary videos. They've done various videos with stats, but not sure I've ever seen them do one with clips of politicians spliced in as well to create a blend between their standard of just the stats with the common TV commentator of pure commentary to find a nice balance between the two forms.