Quote:Right, Representative. He's in the top 35 of 525 for cosponsoring legislation, although correct that he doesn't author many bills on his own. He's the Chairman of the progressive caucus. So... Not a policy maker?Well, his job is literally to make policy, so he's not just a lump occupying a seat. But an influential policy maker? Someone who actually has clout in how the US government acts? Not really. Most of his ideas fall flat on their face - how'd the Cheney impeachment go? He's too far to the left. He introduces an enormous number of bills, but very few of them actually shape policy.
Also, he's not Chairman of the Progressive Caucus. He used to be, back in 2001-2004... when the Dems were out of congressional power and could accomplish nothing.
Quote:This is the same government that has a tax id for every single person (paying or not), and corporate entity (paying or not), and has laws that require withholding to be collected from every paycheck for individuals, and from every company at least quarterly. So, how hard would it be to count how many of those tax id's contributed? Having worked on automation projects for my own states Dept. of Revenue, I can tell you that the State government has a weekly measure of payers and revenue. How hard is it to add up 50 states contributions?Would these numbers precisely equal the number of unemployed? Or only approximately? I'm certainly no expert in these calculations, but I suspect those numbers already go into the model - they just don't cover everything.
Quote:Servicing the debt is now the 2nd largest portion of the US budget, slightly below runaway social program spending.No. Military spending is still no. 1, followed by social security, followed by medicare. Debt service is about half of any of those three. Where did you get your information that says otherwise?
Quote:The BLS is the agency charged with producing THE number. A man with two watches doesn't really know what time it is, unless they agree. What I do know is that the BLS is wrong, and not by a little.Their numbers are (apparently) based on models until they have the final data to confirm. Things like seasonal adjustments make this nontrivial. When they get the final data, they correct their numbers, as they have here. If you prefer more inclusive measures of unemployment, use U6 rather than U1, which would tell you the unemployment rate is more like 16%. If you want a precisely accurate, up-to-the-minute unemployment statistic that doesn't rely on estimations or models for their first-pass calculations, then you want something they can't provide.
If you're accusing them of playing politics, then why on earth did they correct the numbers? And why now, voluntarily? It's not like someone caught them cheating - they fixed the number themselves, apparently in line with the kind of corrections they always do as data gets better. Surely the Obama administration has nothing more to gain today than it did last month, or four months ago. It wasn't an election year. What's the motive?
The Bureau of Labour Statistics press release is here. Maybe I'm not reading it critically enough, but it doesn't sound ominous.
-Jester