Friday, January 06, 2006

These people kill me.

According to the AP, Job Growth Slows in Dec. After Nov. Spurt

Sounds like bad news, right? You have to read into the story to discover that the unemployment rate dropped to 4.9%. And even then, the spin is bizarre.


The Labor Department's fresh snapshot of the nation's jobs climate, released Friday, also showed that the unemployment rate dipped from 5 percent in November to 4.9 percent in December, as some people left the labor market for any number of reasons.


This is contradicted by the numbers given in the story itself, which notes that payroll jobs continued to increase, not decrease.

It’s time to face facts on the economy. It makes no difference what the unemployment rate is, or how many people are employed, or how much money they make, or how many of them are buying their own homes. The media are not going to budge from their line that the economy is terrible. At least not until 2009.

3 comments:

MeaninglessHotAir said...

Same old same old. The 99% full glass can always be proclaimed 1% empty by those with cunning and desire.

Morgan said...

Yup, the November jobs report was revised upward by 90,000 jobs (to 305,000). That's not the headline.

If December's report had hit expectations, tough, the headline would have been "Revised November Jobs Data Triggers Inflation, Interest Rate Fears".

Incidentally, it seems to me that upward revisions have been the norm for the past few years.

Unknown said...

I heard the guys on the panel talking about this on Fox Special Report.

Mort Kondracke [who is certainly not hurting] was saying that a lot of folks including conservatives conceded that this economy was not all that great for working people.

Well it would be even worse if they did not have jobs.

A lot of the things that make life difficult for the poor can not be easily remedied by raising taxes on the rich.