President Obama immediately ballyhooed the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ September unemployment rate of 7.8 percent as the logical outcome of the good work he has done.
But the BLS was promoting B.S. … according to many conservatives.
NPR’s talking heads immediately pooh-poohed the idea that there was a conspiracy going on at the BLS. “That’s not how Washington works,” they informed us. And as if of one voice, Washington insiders rallied to the BLS.
Former GE CEO Jack Welch, one of the doubters, defended his skepticism in the Wall St. Journal. BLS data are decidedly not “handled like the gold in Fort Knox, with gun-carrying guards watching their every move, and highly trained, white-gloved super-agents counting and recounting hourly.” His basic take on the allegedly sacrosanct numbers? “Get real.” Welch provided more than a little reason to suspect “the possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process.” And he noted that skepticism is not just a right-wing trait:
I’m not the first person to question government numbers, and hopefully I won’t be the last. Take, for example, one of my chief critics in this go-round, Austan Goolsbee, former chairman of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers. Back in 2003, Mr. Goolsbee himself, commenting on a Bush-era unemployment figure, wrote in a New York Times op-ed: “the government has cooked the books.”
Truth is, unemployment figures are not tallies of surefire data, but statistical extrapolations based on surveys. They are more like Gallup Poll results — but perhaps less reliable.
And Welch is right to conclude that “the coming election is too important to be decided on a number,” especially that kind of number.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.