NY Post on job growth numbers.. Hmmm

[curious]

I never imagined I'd be citing the NY Post but...

http://www.nypost.com/business/23936.htm
WHAT ARE THEY SMOKING AT THE LABOR DEPT.?

By JOHN CRUDELE


May 11, 2004 -- DON'T get too excited about all those new jobs that were supposed to have been created in April.

I'm not going to waste a lot of my precious space on this, but the bottom line is that most of the 288,000 jobs that the Labor Department says were created last month may not really exist.

They could be figments of statisticians' optimism.

Anyone who plodded through my column last Thursday knows I predicted that job growth in April would be better than the 160,000 to 170,000 jobs that the "pros" were anticipating.

But I also said, quite emphatically I hope, that the stronger growth would be an illusion - the result of the Labor Department's computers making happy predictions about seasonal job creation that could neither be verified nor justified.

I'll explain one aspect.

Back in the March employment report, the government added 153,000 positions to its revised total of 337,000 new jobs because it thought (but couldn't prove) loads of new companies were being created in this economy.

That estimate comes from the Labor Department's "birth/death model." You can look up these numbers on the Department's Web site.

As staggering as the assumption about new companies was in March, the Labor Department got even more brazen in April.

Last Friday, it was disclosed that these imaginary jobs had been increased by 117,000 to 270,000 for the latest month - because, I guess, the stat jockeys got a vision from the gods of spring.

Without those extra 117,000 make-believe jobs, the total growth for April would have been just 171,000 - sub-par for an economy that's supposed to be growing at more than 4 percent a year, but right on the pros' targets....

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