Looking at polls, and just talking around, the economy and the chances of keeping your job, are the top concerns among US voters, going into this election. Incumbent politicians tend to say the economy is better or getting better. Insurgent politicians harp on how bad things are. Who's right?
Who knows? The two numbers the guvmint sends out are bogus. The unemployment rate the newsies report is actually the number of workers drawing unemployment benefits. When unemployment runs out, that worker is no longer unemployed. He may not, probably does not, have a job, but since he ain't drawing unemployment any more, he ain't unemployed. At the depths of Great Depression 2.0, back in 2008, unemployment got up to 9 or 10 percent. Since then it has dropped back to 5% nationwide, 2.7% in New Hampshire. Much of this "improvement" represents people's unemployment benefits running out.
Then we have "New Jobs Created". This number represents new hires in companies big enough to have to report such things to Washington. But the number doesn't take layoffs into account. A company could layoff 1000 senior employees and hire 1000 new high school grads at minimum wage in the same year, but it counts as 1000 jobs "grown".
With statistics this flaky, politicians can say the economy is getting better, or getting worse and have statistics to prove it either way.
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics" was Mark Twain's slam at this sort of thing.
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