by Dan
Crosby
of The Daily Pen
NEW YORK, NY
- The state of California has the largest population of any state in
America. It has an economy which, if it
were an independent nation, would rank in the top 10 in the world.
It also has
one of the highest rates of unemployment in America, above 10%. In some counties in the state’s central
agricultural region, unemployment is around 25%.
Considering
these metrics, one would think it might be necessary for a federal government
report on the national labor rate to include the Golden State.
One would
think this, unless you are a democrat seeking re-election by padding job
numbers to make it appear like your liberal economic policies are working when
they are not.
After this week’s surprisingly
positive jobless claims number was released, three things happened according to
Business Insider.
1.
Lots
of people felt better about the economy
2.
Democrats
cheered because they thought the number would help Obama
3.
Republicans
seized on confusing reports that the numbers had "excluded claims from one
large state" (probably California) and blasted the number as wrong and
misleading.
Since then, the argument
has raged on, and there have been a variety of different reports and
interpretations. Well, we're glad to say
that we've finally gotten to the bottom of what happened.
We spoke to a source at
the Labor Department. According to this source, who is an analyst at the
Department, here's what happened:
- ALL STATES WERE INCLUDED in this week's jobless claims. Assertions that "a large state" was excluded from the report are patently false.
However, dissenters are
not saying California was excluded. They
are saying that California did not provide its state labor statistics before
the deadline required by the publisher of this particular report. Of course, California was not excluded. It was included and the number published was
0. Zero because California did not provide
statistics. Here’s how economists
explain:
- It is likely that some of the jobless claims in one large state--California--were not included in the claims reported to the Department of Labor this week. This happens occasionally, our source says. When a state's jobless claims bureau is short-staffed, sometimes the state does not process all of the claims that came in during the week in time to get them to the DOL. The source believes that this is what happened this week.
- The California claims that were not processed in time to get into this week's jobless report will appear in future reports, most likely next week's or the following week's. In other words, those reports might be modestly higher than expected.
- The source believes that the number of California claims that were not processed totalled about 15,000-25,000. Thus, if one were to "normalize" the overall not-seasonally-adjusted jobless claims number, it would increase by about 15,000-25,000.
- This week's "normalized" jobless claims number, therefore, would be about 355,000-365,000, not the 339,000 that was reported. This compares to the 370,000 consensus expectation.
In other words, had all
of California's jobless claims been processed in time to make the
jobless-claims release, this jobless number would still have been better than
economists were expecting--but not as much better as it appeared.
Again, the
as-yet-unprocessed claims will appear in future reports. So next week's number
may well be higher than expected.
So, who's right about
today's jobless claims number?
Everyone's right!
- Jobless claims were better
than expected, even after adjusting for an unusual anomaly
- There was an unusual anomaly that made this week's jobless claims look better than they would otherwise have been.
Of course, there was a motive to create good news after Barack Obama's abysmal performance at the first 2012 presidential debate, just before the jobs reports came out. One way to do that is fake key economic indicators in favor of Obama.
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