Good Question! I think that lately our economists-in-chief have been pulling miracles of lying with statistics to create a positive future economic outlook. I think that slowly people are catching up with lies and exaggerations of this administration!

Actually, I’ve seen the numbers from past months revised up on several occasions recently. The funny thing is listening to the media spin this into a negative, as you hint at in your post. On NPR today, the line was “Economic growth was up, but employment gains were weak.”

as for “ “‘s comment, the federal economic numbers are an enormous hodge-podge of cooked books and magical numbers that people come up with to give us a sense of security. the current administration’s magicians aren’t any more crooked than the previous administrations.

Shandor - Something makes me think you’re not a Bush supporter, and you don’t realize yet you’ve stumbled on a conservative blog.

Anyway, Bryan’s comments are good. Every administration twists the numbers as much as they can (and employment stats are much more malleable than, say, inflation). But they have some idea of what they can get away with, i.e. Carter knew he couldn’t claim the economy was growing. My personal gut feeling (I was laid off for 9 months 2 years ago, now I’m not scared about being fired at all) is that the economy is good but not great, which is just what these current numbers say.

(1) short term fluctuations are nothing to get uptight about. If you look at the graphs of some of our most productive years, the upward growth typically has some jagged edges. There is NEVER a smooth continual upward growth. Always jagged. This means that even in the best growth years, there are going to be some medocre or even setback months.

(2) While sharp economic improvement usually means steady growth for both the establishment and the household survey, there are some situations where one survey does particularly good… even possibly at the expense of the other. For example, increases in self-employment typically increase the household numbers at the expense of the establishment survey. The establishment is better at picking up employment trends for larger businesses and sometimes misses the fact that someone who left a job at a large business later became self-employeed or started their own small business.

(3) No one has cooked the books. There had been a steady upwards trend for the past couple of years. Most of the really bad employment losses occurred in 2000, which, btw, happened while Bush was in office, but BEFORE Bush could have done anything about it (we were still under Clinton’s last budget). Some of this was fallout from 9/11. During this first couple of years under Bush, corporations were sheading jobs left and right… but many of these unemployeed were just going into business for themselves. This caused a major rift between the two surveys. The household survey showed VERY minimal job losses while the establishment survey showed deep job losses. Naturally, the liberals suddenly became establishment survey believers because THIS was the survey they could point to which showed 3 million job losses at one point.

(4) Nevertheless, we are now at a point where the household survey shows almost 4 million jobs gained since Bush first took office and ALL of the losses in the Establishment survey that the liberals were complaining about have now been erased. In fact, this 3 million jobs lost that Kerry use to moan about has now turned into a net GAIN of 1 million jobs since Bush 1st took office… nothing to brag about, but nothing to ridicule about either.

Overall, the liberals have some crow to eat on the jobs situation considering their exagerations and pot shots they took over this issue during the presidential campaigns. They can’t have it both ways. They can call the establishment survey sacred when, under the bush admin, it showed dismal numbers… then call it suspicious when it shows overall good numbers. Such behavior is childish and pathetic.

(but should we be surprised? probably not)