Unemployment

[kandrathe]

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.

Cheney imprisonment sounds like pandering to the progressives, whether or not it's realistic doesn't seem to enter into their philosophy.

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.

The actual number of Tax Id's generating revenue last month, versus this month is not such a hard statistic. Number of new Id's gives you the net immigration, the ones with no income maybe lost their job, or moved out of the state. Even separating individual income from corporate, you can take gross revenue collected from individual income, and divide by the average to estimate the number of tax payers.

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?

http://www.federalbudget.com/
I guess it depends how you slice it up. SSI and the department of health and human services are higher than the department of defense. Also, this table is actual, rather than budget.

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.

But, how about something that is within 2%-3% of accurate?

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?

In my profession, people play this game as well (however I don't to the consternation of some of my colleagues.) Eventually, the deception is revealed. So, I guess for them it's better to confess to an oversight, and then return to the manipulation as usual. I think the motive is to convince people that the recession is over, so back to business as usual.