So, It's About Jobs, Is It?

[fintstone]

According to the "serial liar"...we have lost millions of jobs in the last 4 years. I cannot quite figure out the math used to determine this. I found Neal Boortz take on this interesting:

SO, IT'S ABOUT JOBS, IS IT?

OK ... so you've fallen for the Kerry line that George Bush is the first president in 72 years to actually lose jobs during his first four years in office. Fine ... believe that if you want to. Please, though, try to come up with a cogent and reasoned answer to this question if you can. The Bureau of Labor Statistics issues a document entitled the "Employment Situation Summary" every month. The most recent survey was released at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, October 8, 2004. This survey indicated that there were 139.5 millions working during September. That, my friends, is a record. Never before have 139.5 million Americans had a job during any survey period.

Here's your question: If a record number of Americans were employed in September of 2004, how can it be said that jobs were lost under President Bush? Come on, folks! Tell me! How do you lose jobs and end up with a record number of Americans working?

By the way ... some more information you can sling around at lunch or dinner today to make yourself seem inestimably wise. The unemployment rate for September was 5.4%. That's considered to be low. Here's a breakdown:

Adult men – 5.0%

Adult women – 4.7%

Teenagers – 16.6%

Now teenagers aren't generally heads of households. That would mean that the unemployment rate for people who actually have to work for a living and support a family is somewhere between 4.7 and 5.0%.

If you want to base your vote for president on the current jobs situation ... fine. Do it. Just get the correct information before you do.

[fintstone]

Originally posted by LynnsABCs
From factcheck.org - - -

Job Loss

Kerry misled when he claimed the economy has lost 1.6 million jobs under Bush. It is true that figures released earlier in the day show the economy is still down by 1.6 million private sector jobs since Bush took office, but the drop in total payroll employment -- including teachers, firemen, policemen and other federal, state and local government employees -- is down by much less than that -- 821,000. Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced, with the release of the latest figures, that its yearly "benchmark" revision would add an estimated 236,000 payroll jobs to the total when made final next February. That means the best current estimate is that 585,000 jobs have been lost under Bush, about one-third of the number Kerry stated.

Kerry may turn out to be correct when he said Bush would be "the first president in 72 years to lose jobs." Payroll employment has been growing at roughly 100,000 jobs per month for the past four months, and there are only four months to go -- October, November, December and January -- until the end of Bush's term in January, 2005. (The number that will actually go into the economic history books won't be known until February 2006, when the BLS publishes its final benchmark revisions of 2004 data.)

So...how does that explain this:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics issues a document entitled the "Employment Situation Summary" every month. The most recent survey was released at 8:30 a.m. on Friday, October 8, 2004. This survey indicated that there were 139.5 millions working during September. That, my friends, is a record. Never before have 139.5 million Americans had a job during any survey period.

[widebody911]

What you're failing to take into account is that when that $60k programming job was shipped to India, it was replaced by 2 service sector jobs making $20k each.

[fintstone]

Originally posted by widebody911
What you're failing to take into account is that when that $60k programming job was shipped to India, it was replaced by 2 service sector jobs making $20k each.

How would I conclude that has happened?

[RallyJon]

when that $60k programming job was shipped to India

There are plenty of jobs for good, $60k programmers. The problem is that even crappy programmers were getting paid $100k during the bubble years. When you try to hire good people and the only candidates you get a) are not very bright and b) have a vastly overdeveloped ego from the silly title and salary they were given back in 2000, who can blame you for looking elsewhere?

Kind of like the auto industry. Or any other industry.

[bryanthompson]

Because, silly, that's what the lefties are telling you. How dare you question their 'facts.'

Highest growth in the last year than we've had in the previous 20 years. Lowest unemployment on record, more jobs than ever. Yep, sounds pretty darn awful to me.

[techweenie]

Funny that the Bush administration does not dispute the 4-year job loss...

I guess they need you mathematical geniuses to help them out.

From FactCheck.org:

[island911]

factcheck.org is about as apolitical as 60-minutes.

Originally posted by widebody911
What you're failing to take into account is that when that $60k programming job was shipped to India, it was replaced by 2 service sector jobs making $20k each.

Jobs that go to India are usually so close to being fully automated that they will be replaced by machines soon anyway. So quit crying.

[widebody911]

Originally posted by island911
Jobs that go to India are usually so close to being fully automated that they will be replaced by machines soon anyway. So quit crying.

Your ignorance of outsourcing is astounding.

[gaijinda]

Ingnorance of history is astounding. And dangerous. Look up Luddite in the dictionary. Then get back to us.

[island911]

Thom, Are ya sure about that?

fwiw, I've had many of my major projects get turned-over to China. This is not an issue I am glib about.

The type of jobs being outsoursed to India, by and large, are/were call-centers, dictation-transciption, coding.

call-centers -- going automated (those coders, doncha know)
dictation-transciption, -- speech recognition software.
coding -- libraries of modular code grows larger . ..cmptr speeds allow such bloated blocks. Dependency on smart coders drops.

[turbo6bar]

If we want to bring back jobs from India, wouldn't it be fair to tell Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, and BMW to close their US plants and send jobs back to Germany and Japan?

[928ram]

Bosch, Agfa, Fujifilm, Bayer.. and that just a few from this state alone.

[bryanthompson]

http://finance.indiainfo.com/news/2004/10/08/0810bpo.html

"I think this dispute about outsourcing is highly exaggerated. For every Dollar that is outsourced by US business to India, US insources at least 10 Dollars of business from India," Chidambaram said in an interview to BBC.

"What do they (US) outsource? They outsource low-end jobs, call centres, help centres. What do they insource? They insource orders for capital goods, for technology, for design, for brands, for trademarks, for intellectual property," he explained.

He said the gains of US business through insourcing far outweigh the alleged outsourcing losses. "Believe me, US business knows that it can remain competitive only if it outsources low end jobs."

According to a McKinsey & Co. (an independent resource group) study, for every $1 that we outsource, the US economy gains between $1.12 and $1.14.

[ubiquity0]

Originally posted by LynnsABCs
Golly gee, I guess total US population didn't increase over the last 4 years--that's why unemployment figures are shown as percentages.

Kerrys arguement is based on the gross # of jobs though, not unemployment rate.

[tabs]

OK lets for the sake of argument say Kerry's numbers on jobs lost are accurate....Why is Bush the first prez since Hoover to lose jobs....

Lets look at the last prez to lose jobs...Herbert Hoover....Hoover was caught by the Great Depression 10 months after taking office..(so he can hardly be blamed for the Depression but can be held accountable for not relieving it). Look at what Bush was caught by .....a DOT COM Bubble bursting in the Stock Market...911 which caused 1M jobs to evaporate and put us into a war, the corporate scandals which was a further crisis of confidence in our economic/financial system.... All of which add up to 3 straight years of decline in the Stock Market, making it the worst Bear Stock Market since the Great Depression BTW The stage was set for these crisis to unfold by the previous administrations policies...

So the long and short of it is Bush was faced with a Depression and NOT a Recession, one which paralleled the Great Depression...

SO it is quiet remarkable that the USA is doing as well as it is economically. This is largely due to the decrease in interest rates to the lowest rate in 40 years to keep the system liquid, lowering taxes which keep the money in the hands of the consumer, and keeping Federal spending high....All these policies were needed to keep the USA out of a all out DEPRESSION. As Alan Greenspan said it is remarkable that the depth of the recession was as shallow and short as it was....

[fintstone]

Originally posted by techweenie
Funny that the Bush administration does not dispute the 4-year job loss...

I guess they need you mathematical geniuses to help them out.

From FactCheck.org:

Gee tech...I imagine yuou had to look long and hard to find a chart that was old enough that it did not show last month where we broke the all-time employment record...what is that last dateon your chart...last Jan..almost a year ago???How convenient?

[widebody911]

I guess that old trade deficit is just a figment of Liberal imagination then...

[jyl]

This is a complicated subject. In brief, the data that fintstone quoted is not considered a reliable or accurate measure of the total US job count. The reliable data that economists and investors actually use does, in fact, show a decline in total US jobs since 2000.

If you want to the details, I'll explain - it's a bit long, so bear with me here.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) gathers data using different surveys. One major method is to survey a sample of 160,000 employers covering 400,000 workplaces to gather statistics for how many people are on their payrolls, how much they are paid, etc. This is called the "establishment payroll survey" or the "payroll survey" for short. For details: http://www.bls.gov/ces/cesmetho.htm#3 Another major method is the survey a sample of 60,000 households to gather statistics for how many are working, etc. This is called the "current population survey" or the "household survey"[. For details: http://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/homch1_b.htm

The monthly news releases of the BLS presents a mix of data from these (and other) sources. It is a bit confusing. For example, look at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm and notice where it cites the establishment survey and where it cites the household survey.

The two surveys don't always give the same results. One difference is that the number of employed persons reported by the two methods has been different in recent years. In recent years, the payroll survey has been showing weaker job growth trends than the household survey has been showing. For example, the payroll survey reports 131,916,000 total nonfarm jobs in Sep 04, while the household survey shows 139,480,000 total civilian jobs in Sep 04. The payroll survey reported 130,135,000 total nonfarm jobs in Sep 03, while the household survey shows 137,731,000 total civilian jobs in Sep 03.

There are several reasons for these differences, which are discussed in a 10/8/04 BLS paper here: http://www.bls.gov/cps/ces_cps_trends.pdf Some reasons are (a) the payroll survey covers a much larger sample and is thus more accurate, (b) the payroll survey is checked/re-calibrated annually against unemployment insurance tax records, and (c) the household survey's raw results have to be extrapolated to the entire US population using census data (gathered every 10 years) and limited data gathered between census years.

Economists view the payroll survey as a more accurate count of nonfarm wage/salary employment (i.e. people who draw a paycheck for working other than on a farm), and the source of the most detailed industry employment data (e.g. oil and gas extraction, construction of buildings, textile mills, etc). The household data is considered a less accurate count of wage/salary employment, but is used to get a a picture of unemployed, self-employed, unpaid and agricultural workers (who wouldn't be counted in the payroll survey) and the reasons for their situation (actively seeking work, discouraged but want work, don't want work, etc), and the source for demographic employment data (e.g. by race and sex) as well as some broad industry-level data.

Therefore, economists focus on the payroll survey as an indicator of the national employment situation. Investors also focus on the payroll survey as an indicator of whether the US is adding or losing jobs. Again, the main reason is because the payroll survey is more accurate and detailed, and is not affected by extrapolation for population estimates.

Anyway, the point of all this is that there is a good reason why essentially all knowledgeable and reputable commentators refer to the payroll survey and agree that total US jobs have declined from 2000 to the present. The household survey, which is what was quoted in the message that started this thread, is not considered a reliable measure of total US jobs.

As the BLS paper says:

"the upward trend in household employment since the end of the 2001 recession has been largely a function of the estimated growth in population. That is to say, the household survey has not shown an increase in the proportion of the population that is employed."

What this is saying is that the household survey appears to show job growth (since 2001) only because of the extrapolation of estimated US population growth.

The household survey results do show that there are now fewer jobs per unit of population. Here's the details: the ratio of employed persons (over 16 y/o) to the total population was 62.4% in Sep 04. In Sep '01 this was 63.4%, Sep '02 63.0%. Sep '03 62.1%. I am comparing Septembers because this ratio is seasonal, e.g. it tends to start lower at the beginning of the calendar year and then increase during the year (probably due to summer workers and holiday retail sales jobs). Bureau of Labor Statistics, series LNU02300000).

Hope all this makes sense. I looked into this about a year ago, and it took a bit of digging to understand how these government statistics are collected.

Edit: I re-read this post, and I may not have done a good job explaining things. If anyone wants details, I do suggest reading the 10/8/04 BLS paper which includes all sorts of graphs that make things a bit clearer. If anyone wants to get lots of numbers to play with, I suggest going to http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm by follwing the links you can download all the data you want.

Edit 2: As you may have guessed, the chart from Factcheck.org is based on the payroll survey data, and represents the US jobs situation as economists and investors actually view it. Whoever fintstone was quoting is using the household survey to count total US jobs, which makes sense if you (not fintstone, but whoever he's quoting) are trying to make a political point, but isn't actually reliable or accurate.

Damn, I have to get back to work. Later!

[red-beard]

Originally posted by widebody911
I guess that old trade deficit is just a figment of Liberal imagination then...

The Trade deficit is BS. What counts is value generation. As long as the US generates more value than the trade deficit, then our economy continues to grow. We exceed the trade deficit in value generation by more than a factor of 10.

Go peddle the scare somewhere else.

Cato showed that jobs are bleeding from India and China faster than the US. It is more about effciency than transfer.