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You realize the American government is founded on the idea of separate, autonomous, accountable institutions? The BLS is one of those. Find any evidence at all that the numbers are skewed for political purposes. You can't.
No one is immune from bias and conflicts of interest, but this idea that a privately funded measure of unemployment would be less likely to be corrupted is pure bull.
Ahh...the non-partisan government...just here to protect us from ourselves.
Your point was that the private sector does not have a great track record of telling the truth. Mine was that our government is biased, and they don't always tell the truth either. I have one government, but many companies to choose from.
Not really.With Trump’s immigration policy, doesn’t that improve the unemployment rate simply by eliminating the competition, as you imply?
It won't increase GDP.I’m not sure how Trump’s immigration policy would not help GDP growth, in and of itself. It could actually improve GDP per capita (PPP). Any help?
They want to pay less in taxes, and less in compliance with regulators. They also want to work without restrictions.Corporate after tax profits as a percentage of GDP are the highest they’ve been since 1928. What corporation cares what the regulations are as long as they’re making money, money, money?
You've never worked in the Federal government, have you? Most of it is non-partisan. Only at the top level of an agency at the policy-maker level are politics at all important.
That can have an effect at lower levels....for example, under Bush publication of the differences between male and female pay were strongly discouraged and curtailed. When BLS stopped asking about women workers in the Current Establishment Survey, politics force them to bring it back. Obama required a new program on Green Jobs, which most people found ridiculous, no one at BLS really cared for it and nobody mourned when the program was axed due to sequestration.
But actual calculation of data? There's no politics there.
No, you don't have "one government". Our government is composed of half a hundred separate institutions, with varying degrees of autonomy and accountability. Each of these instutions is staffed by people with political views and biases across the spectrum. This is by design so there are counterbalancing forces hopefully preventing exactly what you are talking about. We don't live in an autocracy. You guys and Trump have polticized non-political instutions by claiming they are lying due to politicization even though that is not occuring to any extreme degree. This is a huge problem and threatens to undermine our democracy. The irony is its a problem you are creating out of paranoia that it already exists.
It's "tack," not "tact." My point was, and is, that the majority of those who work in the federal government are unaffected in their daily job by partisan politics. Census and BLS will not change their methodology under Trump. The intelligence community will not change its methodology under trump. People do their work, and do not shade it by who is in power.Since I worked for and with the Federal Government...should I ignore the rest of your response so you can try another tact?
What are the other governments I have to choose from? Clearly my response was about choice and you are telling me I have many governments to choose from.
Cause the private sector has such a great track record with being honest about politically charged issues (cough: cigarettes causing cancer, CFCs, food safety, pharmaceuticals and "alternative medicine", oil companies on climate change, etc).
We have the government do these things for a reason. Private industries could manufacture a labor crisis to get the governments to cut regulations and lower taxes. If President's really had the power to fudge the BLS numbers, why did Obama and Bush let them get so bad in the first place?
You didn't provide anything worthy of a response. It is worthy of noting job growth declined following the election.
I am just wondering where all the Trump supporters are. But when you think about it, picking and choosing what aspects of reality to which they adhere is their specialty.
a labor market that is increasingly tight.
why is Sears and K-Mart … closing so many stores … And why is Macy's
Obama has done a great job … a low pay, no benefits service sector economy where everyone is part time.
Are you suggesting that we are not sliding into a part time **** job **** pay economy?
Zero jobs happen when it's off-shored but even a 50% reduction in the work force, due to automation, means there is still 50% remaining.
I think the Trump supporters are aware that 94% of the jobs created were low paying part time jobs.
As I remember it was a privately made statement made by a department of labor official. … I would certainly tend to believe the 94% before I would believe a government number.
College grads are getting jobs. In retail.
Pretty common still in CT. Could be why our population is shrinking...people moving out.
Talk is cheap as Obama proved.
that might push wages up, though that won't help GDP growth.
YWith Trump’s immigration policy, doesn’t that improve the unemployment rate simply by eliminating the competition, as you imply?
that we are at under 5% unemployment [is] a lie
I would view jobs reports developed in the private sector as accurate.
the statistics don't jibe with public opinion
Real Time Economics - WSJ creation slowed in December but other details pointed to a tightening labor market. The economy added 156,000 jobs last month, while the jobless rate rose slightly to 4.7% as more Americans entered the labor force. Workers’ hourly wages grew 2.9% over the past 12 months, the strongest yearly gain in more than seven years. Here’s how economists and analysts reacted to Friday’s report.
“For the year, the economy averaged job creation of about 180,000 per month—a solid result, but one that represents the slowest pace since 2012. While this is partially reflective of the slowdown in the pace of economic growth, it also reflects a labor market that is increasingly tight. Employers are simply having a harder time filling open positions as the economy nears full employment.“—Jim Baird, Plante Moran Financial Advisors Economists React to the December Jobs Report: ?Very Close to Full Employment? - Real Time Economics - WSJ
If we are at full employment, wages are rising, and the people who have dropped out of the work force still aren't coming back in, does it still make sense to gut our budget with tax cuts for the wealthy to spur job growth, try to balance the trade deficit with tariffs, and spend a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending we will have to borrow when the economy isn't really in need of the boost? I say no. There's a lot of good in Donald Trump's vision. Western universalism is a failed policy. We should start looking out for our own interests first and let go of trying to westernize China, Russia, and Islam. But with Trump's lack of ability to admit when he's wrong and lack of trust in official figures and academic analysis, I don't see how this ends well. It seems like we will have a Fed increasingly trying to counteract ill advised, inflationary moves by Trump.
the majority of those who work in the federal government are unaffected in their daily job by partisan politics.
that can't really be blamed on Trump, since he hasn't even taken office yet.
If the numbers were as good as he and you want to claim Hillary would have won the WH.
Sure, it helps the unemployment rate, but having an unemployment rate below cyclical levels is NOT a good thing. It means your labor market doesn't have enough human capital in it to meet demand. When you can't fill jobs, then you aren't producing at the maximal level that is possible. Not producing at the maximal level means you aren't growing the economy. One of the big factors in why our economic growth is poor the last few years is because we have a shrinking labor force. There's demand for immigrant labor for a reason. This is why economists say ultimately undocumented immigrants add to the economy more than they take out.
As far as the regulations goes, the business start up time thing is just a measure of what the regulatory burden on businesses are. If you look at the report, many countries have this down to a matter of days. I think you are underestimating the effect these regulatory barriers have on discouraging businesses. Not every company is a giant corporation. They might be doing fine, but your average small business is really just a couple of people trying to make a living and putting hurdles up and making the process more and more complex can really affect their desire to try to start a new business or expand. If these regulations serve a purpose, then that is fine, but I think we need to go over them with a fine comb and see if we can't get those numbers down.
The RWers in this community know what a traitorous, commie asshole I am, and that doesn't cause me to alter my keystrokes when I'm collecting data for BLS.
>>Census and BLS will not change their methodology under Trump.
As you can imagine, I can give ya a list of the ways the new administration could improve data collection efforts at BLS and Census, but I don't think it'll be any more able to overcome the crippling effects of bureaucratic nonsense than those in the past.
When I worked as a field operations supervisor in the 2000 Census, if my boss was walking past my desk when the phone rang, I'd sometimes answer it, "Senseless Bureau, may I help you"?
Markets often discount future expectations.
A very childish view, as one would expect from you.
Will we see this jobs report get revised downward as almost all of the jobs reports for the last 8 years have been??
Not really.
There are a variety of issues with assuming that legal workers can replace unauthorized workers. One is that legal workers are more expensive, as they must be paid on the books and are subject to minimum wages.
Another is that most of the work they're doing is low-skilled work that doesn't pay well. Few American citizens are clamoring for jobs picking fruit at $7.25 per hour.
A third is mobility. A migrant who has already left home is highly mobile, and can go wherever the jobs are. His or her social networks are already spread out across the US, so he or she may know where there's work. A 55 year old former factory worker will likely have family, friends, work networks, mortgages, kids in school etc which reduces his or her ability to move once a year to follow the jobs. They also may not have the requisite networks to find work in a new area.
It won't increase GDP.
Those migrants do in fact consume goods and services right here in America. They pay rent, they buy food, they buy clothes, they buy beer. Most of their income is not saved, which means they have high multiplier factors.
My rough guess is that the billions spent to deport them (which is counted in GDP) will be offset by the lost productivity and spending.
They want to pay less in taxes, and less in compliance with regulators. They also want to work without restrictions.
The problem is that almost every regulation has a reason for its implementation. We passed regulations on auto emissions, because smog was choking our cities. We passed regulations on the banks, because when they operate without regulations they are far more likely to drive the economy into the ground (as we saw in the Great Depression and 2007-2008).
Regulations can become byzantine, and careful pruning or streamlining can be warranted. However, the mere idea that "all regulation is bad" is a partisan one, that ultimately doesn't make sense.
You might say that "zero jobs happen when it's automated but even a 50% reduction in the work force, due to offshoring, means there is still 50% remaining." So I don't see any value to yer analysis.
>>China's GDP growth is 7%, and that's based off of manufacturing so this talk of manufacturing not being a valid driver for the economy anymore falls flat.
That might be true if the Chinese and US economies were more or less identical, but that's not the case.
As pinqy noted, that study is nearly four years old. If the data indicates that low-wage job expansion was dominant in the early years of the recovery, and if the trend over the past seven years is represented by the data I posted in #88, then what does that say about the performance of the labor market in regard to wages over the period 2014-16?
We've seen relatively strong wage growth for production and nonsupervisory employees in three of the past four years.
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That's likely what a lot of Frumpy voters think, but they're wrong, as they are about a great many things.
>>They aren't impressed with the government numbers.
That's unfortunate for all of us, in that it makes them more open to the bizarre lies coming from the Frump camp.
"A privately made statement"? That's pretty funny. So this DOL "official" is aware that the department is lying big-time about its data collection results, and comes to DP to tell us the much-different truth.
I've been collecting data for DOL since 2004. I suppose I'm not in the position this person is to know how the published material differs so radically from reality. Did the lying start in Jan 2009 when we got a Negro commie homo witch doctor in the WH?
Average wages of workers with a college degree ($31.87) are nearly twice that of those with a high school degree only ($17.14). And that gap has increased somewhat over the last year, particularly for men. (source)
This article suggests that "making Connecticut's cities more walkable and adding more amenities [and] investing more in cities and offering specific degrees that feed into Connecticut's existing economy" may offer a solution.
Having a social life is important to college graduates, and the state is never going to make social opportunities in Hartford equal to those of Boston, he said.
"We are so close to these big cities, there is just no way to compete with them," Sabol said. "So if the kids want to go, they go."
Frumpy's mouth may end up costing us a great deal.
Why not?
What evidence do you have that immigration lowers wages?
>>It could actually improve GDP per capita
Or that it diminishes per capita GDP?
For some reason, I don't find yer argument convincing.
As pinqy demonstrated, the private analyses show the same results.
So if the statistics are valid, …
If workers are eliminated, where else have the employers to go for workers?
None. Didn’t say otherwise.
You're assuming that American workers are willing to take those jobs, at those low incomes.To do with what you said about eliminating immigrant competition for US jobs by deportation, nothing you said refutes that. In fact, your reply has no logic. If workers are eliminated, where else have the employers to go for workers? Robots? Most of those jobs are already filled by native residents.
It does, because most of their income is spent in the US. Again, on rent, food, clothing, taxes, beerI agree deporting immigrants would not increase GDP, or PPP. But that the most of their income is not saved does not mean it is spent in the US. Much is sent back to relatives in Mexico, where it is spent.
Yer ignoring the idea that immigrant labor provides support to American jobs that wouldn't otherwise exist.
So should I ignore yer claim?
>>I’m not so sure of that
I should apologise for confusing you. When I prepend two angle brackets to a piece of text, I'm quoting the person I'm replying to, in this case you.
Yer forgetting that it was your scenario that eliminated immigrant labor. So, there is not support as you say to American jobs because there the immigrant labor has been deported. Try and keep up with your own scenario.
Trump’s immigration policy, doesn’t that improve the unemployment rate simply by eliminating the competition
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