Irresponsible Employment Reporting by the Opposition

The opposition media to Obama is irresponsibly and ineffectively performing its job for the American people.  Since the government so-called seasonally adjusted unemployment rate started coming down, it has been common to see the Wall Street Journal headline that a jobs recovery is underway.  Fox News program hosts have been making the same claims.  This is a sad failure of the opposition media to inform Americans of the true situation as the much needed counter-punch to the power-grabbing socialist occupying the White House and his allies in the Senate.

Consider the 10-11 March 2012 issue of the Wall Street Journal:  Jobs Recovery Gains Momentum blares the headline.  The sub-headline was: U.S. Payrolls Climb 227,000 with Growth Across Industries; Unemployment Rate Holds at 8.3%.  Now if this is a gain of momentum in jobs creation, how is it that the unemployment rate remained at 8.3%? 

The answer, not given, might be that because more people found jobs, still more people entered the labor force, which is the sum of the employed and those actively looking for employment as seen by the government.  Interestingly, one of graphs on the front page shows a small uptick in the labor force in February, but it is less than the down-tick in January was.  What is more, the labor force plot is pretty much just downward in the second half of 2009 and all of 2010 and 2011.  There had been an uptick in early 2010, but that is little more than noise on the major trendline.  In fact, it was really just the effect of using seasonally adjusted data when the seasonal effect was somewhat out-of-whack because summer hiring was suppressed by a lack of construction jobs.  Jobs creation momentum was falsely claimed then also.  This WSJ significant graph of the labor force data is shown here:

So, I find myself totally puzzled about the Wall Street Journal evidence that we are seeing any jobs recovery, let alone one that is gaining momentum.  The article does note that the economy has 5.2 million fewer jobs now than it had four years ago.  It notes that the growing working age population ought to have many more jobs available than four years ago for the employed percentage to compare with the pre-Great Recession level.  It observes that most economists say that "unemployment will remain elevated for years unless the pace of hiring accelerates."  Indeed, it is just such acceleration that one would need to see to be able to say that the "Jobs Recovery Gains Momentum."  Not only that, but one would need to see that acceleration apply to several months.  Apparently fools write the headlines, which are all that most people see.

It seems that the economic or business reporters at the Wall Street Journal entrusted with the front page and the headlines just arbitrarily throw things into an article with no understanding of the Big Picture whatsoever.  If the News Corporation, which owns Fox News, Fox News Business, and the Wall Street Journal cannot do better than this, it is no wonder the socialists are so often able to wrest control of our government.  Even the opposition appears to have no economic judgment of note.  It fails to point to the politically and economically crucial facts, so that our economically and business ignorant will become more knowledgeable.  This response to the February jobs numbers out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the oppositions part is characteristic of their frequent failure to point out the significance of the data to the general public.  It is terribly disappointing.  If the voter is dumbed down, how will we ever counter the trend to worse and worse central planning by government?

A far more rational evaluation of the jobs numbers, with some perspective on the history during this recession, is given in my earlier post entitled Sick Economy has More Missing Jobs than in February 2010!  The number of missing jobs, using the non-seasonally adjusted data of the BLS, is almost identical in each of the Februaries of 2010, 2011, and 2012!