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U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

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Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#351

Post by codyklimdev »

newsclues wrote: post #17
franktankbank wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think its probably a lot more complicated than that. I think this started decades ago and we are at a point of pivot. I couldn't tell you where we are pivoting to but I'm not really reassured by the obsessive metricization(?) of our economy, from the stock market to inflation numbers to jobs numbers.

The American economy (and society) were so great it took decades of bipartisan work for the self destruction to become evident. 50+ years https://wtfhappenedin1971.com

Once the gold standard was ended and our fiat currency could be printed and given directly to the ruling class, it was effectively curtains for everyone else.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#352

Post by Tadpole9181 »

peterfirefly wrote: post #283
ta1243 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a new face can reverse policy on a dime, then that reversal can be reversed a couple of years later. It's amazing how few people seem to understand this. Countries are oil tankers, they take years to turn even a little - and that's a good thing. In 2000 the world broadly knew what was going to happen, Gore and BushII would implement pretty much the same policies. Same thing in 2008 when it was McCain and Obama. Su…

> The US does not elect a monarch. It is a constitutional monarchy with an elected, time-limited king. Monarchies generally have (and had) lots of checks on the king's power. Not necessarily the kinds of checks we would like, of course. The rights of the nobility were well-protected, the rights of landless commoners were not.

No, it's really not. The Executive does not have these powers in the constitution. They made it up and assigned it to themselves by loosely interpreting things how they wanted.

Executive orders are memos, not laws. The President has no power for legislation or budget or tariffing. We're supposed to require legislative review of any emergency actions, like using the military.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#353

Post by shlip »

wnevets wrote: post #301
tencentshill wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instilling critical thinking skills from a young age. The actual educational content is far less important. "Learning how to learn" should be the primary purpose of K-12.

How do you test and measure the effectiveness of that kind of curriculum in a standardless way for millions of school children?

elections.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#354

Post by chrisco255 »

yepitwas wrote: post #98
StillBored wrote: post #62

Austerity has repeatably been shown to kill economic growth and trigger recessions/depressions. Yet for whatever reason there is one party in congress who's entire economic policy is basically austerity measures. Repeatedly, the ax man comes in and cuts spending that generates multiples of economic activity in return. This happens all the time cut a $1 here and it costs $4 over there kinds of things. Infrastructure i…

A lot of current conservative grousing about the deficit is priming the electorate for destroying social security. That's why they always highlight it as the main cause of the deficit, even though it has a totally separate income stream from the rest of the budget. Republicans have done the exact opposite of balancing the budget at least since Reagan (inclusive) non-stop, zero R presidents have even done as well as d…

No party's platform is based on ending or destroying social security, especially not the GOP who gets a broad base of support from retirees. That being said, I've never had much faith in it being around for myself, though I'm 30 years from eligibility). It's possible that productivity boosts from automation and AI could overtime make SS actually sustainable in spite of overwhelming boomer population to support.

The federal tax revenue as percentage of GDP is remarkably stable regardless of widely varying income tax rates over the decades (ranging 15-20% since the 1940s): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN. This holds up no matter which regime (D or R) is dominant, because the economy reorganizes itself around incentives or disincentives created by various tax policies.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#355

Post by staticman2 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #286
cs702 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I can suggest is to read Buffett's classic article from 1977: https://fortune.com/article/buffett-how-inflation-swindles-t...

He goes completely off the rails in the very first sentence: It is no longer a secret that stocks, like bonds, do poorly in an inflationary environment. Does it get better?

Why do you think that sentence is wrong?

Hint: What time period do you think he's talking about?

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#356

Post by riazrizvi »

RC_ITR wrote: post #350
riazrizvi wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that pass the basic common sense smell test? Everyone can see on their paycheck the amount, that is paid 30 days after any work day in the worst case. These payments are sent to a single federal bank account, and data-wise are combined with Social Security ID, sending bank id, date. It’s a bank, there’s a database. We are talking at most about 200mm records, a raspberry pi can process that query in minutes. If w…

Not all 'normal income' is from a "job" as we think of it and assuming that does not even come close to passing any informed person's smell test . Parsing tax or SS payments for what a "job" is would be a logistical nightmare, because that's not what the system is designed for (unlike the BLS's system, which is designed to count jobs).

When ppl want job numbers they want a reliable proxy for the state of the economy. Fixing it on changes to payroll-based social security payments would be far better than what we have now, if timely.

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#357

Post by logifail »

dragontamer wrote: post #318
logifail wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you reporting on this breaking news scandal that predictions about future events are not always perfectly accurate? If the predictions are always (or mostly) wrong but always in one direction then wouldn't one begin to suspect that either a) the model is flawed, or b) that there's goal-seeking behind the scenes? If there's a recent revision of BLS figures showing a correction of PLUS 900k jobs, I'd love to see…

> If there's a recent revision of BLS figures showing a correction of PLUS 900k jobs, I'd love to see it. I know right? It's like the new numbers from the BLS are shit or something. Trump fires the last guy, and then a month later they claim that Joe Biden lost 900,000++ jobs. A correction of this size that has never happened before. It's like firing the head of statistics ruins your reputation and intimidates the ot…

Apologies but this isn't unique, nor has it anything specifically to do with the current POTUS. The US jobs figures has had huge revisions downwards before, for instance last year:

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4142722-why-was-there-such-a-b...

"There's still ongoing chatter about the huge revision to U.S. job growth seen yesterday and what it might signify for the economy and markets. 818,000 jobs were wiped out in the 12 months through March 2024 (or 68,000 per month), resulting in the biggest downward adjustment since the global financial crisis."

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#358

Post by logifail »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #324
logifail wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Such simple statistics and data gathering [...] Simple?! "Sweet summer child..." On a more serious note, how would one ensure that a government department be sufficiently independent that it can publish data (implicitly) critical of its own political leaders without fear of retribution? Answers on a postcard, please...

In fact, the BLS budget has been cut (DOGEd) and they have been warning for months now that this is impacting their ability to follow up on surveys.

> the BLS budget has been cut (DOGEd) and they have been warning for months now that this is impacting their ability to follow up on surveys

This was broken long before DOGE was a thing:

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4142722-why-was-there-such-a-b...

"There's still ongoing chatter about the huge revision to U.S. job growth seen yesterday and what it might signify for the economy and markets. 818,000 jobs were wiped out in the 12 months through March 2024 (or 68,000 per month), resulting in the biggest downward adjustment since the global financial crisis."

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#359

Post by RC_ITR »

riazrizvi wrote: post #356
RC_ITR wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all 'normal income' is from a "job" as we think of it and assuming that does not even come close to passing any informed person's smell test . Parsing tax or SS payments for what a "job" is would be a logistical nightmare, because that's not what the system is designed for (unlike the BLS's system, which is designed to count jobs).

When ppl want job numbers they want a reliable proxy for the state of the economy. Fixing it on changes to payroll-based social security payments would be far better than what we have now, if timely.

Sure, that's personal income and can be found here:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PINCOME

Re: U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier

#360

Post by ndiddy »

wredcoll wrote: post #180
bananalychee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not without precedent, but the fact that initial job numbers have been consistently inflated over the last 3 years and that the magnitude of the downwards revisions is on par with 2008-2009 for two years in a row (and growing) is concerning.

How exactly were they inflated?

The monthly employment numbers the BLS publishes are basically nonsense and I'm sure they wouldn't publish them if Congress didn't force them to. At the middle of every month, they run a survey asking ~120,000 businesses how many employees they had as of the 12th of the month. It takes 8 weeks for all the responses to the survey to come in, but the initial monthly numbers are based off of the first 2 weeks of responses. This initial data is always more representative of larger companies. The BLS then generally issues two corrections to each month's data, one when all the responses to the surveys come in and the other when they get the actual unemployment numbers from quarterly unemployment insurance tax filings.

We see large corrections in employment numbers when there's rapid changes in the job market that mess with the models, or when the changes are focused towards small companies. Right-wingers have somehow decided that all of this is instead due to the BLS somehow being out to get Trump, despite there being no significant changes to how the jobs report is made since the mid-90s.

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