Saturday, September 04, 2004

I assure you, I won't whine!

The folks at Campaign Kerry are having trouble with sending the message out, unless the message is "We can't get it right." Per Fox News, (9/3 story) this came out of their office:

"The economy has lost 1.8 million private sector jobs since Bush took office," the campaign said in a statement. "He must create 900,000 jobs in each of the next two jobs reports just to hit zero jobs created under his watch."

The number that has been bouncing around forever in this campaign is 2.5 to 2.6M (I am going to use the 2.6 from now on) lost jobs. Bush is up to 1.7M. That's 800 to 900 thousand, not 1.8M. But they say that is private sector jobs. What the heck? So of the 2.6M, some amount was private sector and that is still 1.8M now? But the gain has 'climbed back' to 1.7M. Their arithmetic says losses have been 3.5M, not the 2.6M that has been bouncing around.

I am not an economist, only minoring in it a long while back, but I can do arithmetic. They like to throw around numbers, so I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics website and took a look at some numbers so I can throw them around. Here are some numbers I crunched from various Table 1's "Civilian labor force and unemployment by census regions and divisions, seasonally adjusted1"

Total Employment (Access tables here)
Dec 2000 136.8M
Aug 2001 136.6M
Jan 2002 135.9M
Jun 2004 139.4M

I see 2.6M jobs created by Bush.

Yes, I am an amateur reading labor statistics. I also noticed the dynamics of both labor force and unemployment growth and the interrelationships of the two. But how much more wrong am I than Kerry's campaign in throwing around numbers? I am serious. If I am wrong, I would love to hear from you. If I am as accurate and reasonable, then .... hmmmm..... HEY, VOTE FOR ME!


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