That 3% GDP growth number was bizarre
While the jobs numbers had this big kind of mysterious revision, if they didn’t have the revision, then the jobs numbers were fully consistent with a 3% GDP growth we also so last week, and that’s even before the Big Beautiful Bill passes… — Kevin Hassett on Fox By now, the news that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported weak job growth for July and revised its estimates for May and June down very substantially has spread beyond the usual audience of connoisseurs. Though those revisions were large by historical standards,… Read More
NYC murder count revisiting old lows
Donald Trump and his loyal army of right-wing blowhards like to scream, as he did back in 2023, that “MURDERS & VIOLENT CRIME HIT UNIMAGINABLE RECORDS!” in New York City. Of course he had a particular interest in making that claim—he was being prosecuted by both state and city back then, and he thought false claims about violent crimes would me him look innocent and prosecutors look unfairly obsessed. But despite being fictitious, this sort of bloviating did have broader unfortunate effects, scaring suburbanites and winning votes for right-wing politicians in and… Read More
No, federal spending and employment are not “out of control”
Among the leading fantasies of the moment are that federal employment and spending are “out of control,” so drastic action is needed to put things back in order. These are lies. Some people who utter these lies probably know better and some don’t, but they’re still lies. First, let’s look at federal expenditures and revenues as a percent of GDP. (These come from table 3.2 in the national income accounts, by the way.) People who want to deceive will often cite raw dollar amounts to amplify the gee-whiz factor, but the only… Read More
NYC is not a killing field
I have a weakness for the New York Post. Their politics are odious, but damn, they’re very skilled practitioners of the tabloid arts. Right now, though, they’re trying to convince New Yorkers—with some success, alas—that we’re in the midst of a horrid crime wave. Just as I was typing that, I got a notification from the Post on my phone reporting that four students were slashed in a fight inside a high school. The paper is tireless in its fearmongering. In this campaign, they’re assisted by Donald Trump, who bellowed on his Truth Social platform… Read More
Oil and gasoline prices move together
I keep seeing people on social media saying things like, “Well oil prices are down but gasoline prices are still high.” Look, the last thing I want to do is defend the fossil fuel industry. It should be put out of business as soon as possible because it’s a threat to civilization and maybe human life itself. But on this point, the social media pundits are wrong. For example, in August 2013, crude oil (as measured by West Texas Intermediate, the US benchmark) was $107 a barrel and the average gasoline price… Read More
No strike wave in 2021
There was a lot of enthusiastic talk about a wave of labor militancy last year—remember “Striketober”? With the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) preliminary data for December out—it will be slightly revised next month, but not by much—we can now look at the full year in historical perspective. It was a quiet year, even by recent standards. First, the number of “stoppages” involving 1,000 workers or more.* There were about half as many major strikes in 2021 as there were in 2018 (the year of the teachers’ strikes) and 2019 (which included… Read More
Americans staying put
There are certain things that people say that sound so true that others repeat them credulously without feeling the need to cite evidence. Two covid-era favorites: everybody’s working from home (WFH). And people have decamped en masse for the hinterlands, thanks to WFH. Neither is really true. I wrote about the slim WFH numbers in September. In July, which was the most recent month available then, 13.2% of the employed were teleworking, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ favored term. In October, that had fallen to 11.6% (graph below). Their ranks were still… Read More
Striketober wasn’t
As marvelous as it would be to see a revival of labor militancy, people got a little ahead of things calling last month “Striketober.” According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) stats, it was a blip by historical standards. Here’s a graph of the number of workers involved in strikes or lockouts (the BLS counts them together) since 2000. There were 57 months with higher numbers of workers off the job. At the high point of this graph, May 2018, there were over fourteen times as many workers on strike as there… Read More
Cutting UI early hurt job growth
Employers, right-wing politicians, and the pundits who speak for them have been claiming that the expansion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to counter covid woes was hurting job growth. By making it possible to refuse crappy jobs, or maybe even not to work at all, that sort of public sector generosity was making the working class too picky. They’re a lazy lot, you know, and need a good kick in the ass to get them to perform their class duty of laboring for the boss. Problem is there’s just no evidence that… Read More
Why UI isn’t enough
I’m going to be posting a series of commentaries on the current crisis. Here’s a quick first It’s odd to see Democrats like Pelosi and Schumer objecting to Republican schemes to send everyone a check for $1,000, maybe two. Of course, one- or two-off checks for $1,000 won’t pay many of the the bills for very long. But talk of means-testing right now looks mean, cheap, and politically suicidal. Schumer says that rather than write checks, we should expand unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. It would have to be some expansion. Benefits are low,… Read More
No robo
You can hardly look at Twitter without reading something about the impending AI revolution: robots are coming for your job. I’m a skeptic. By that I don’t mean to argue that IT and AI and all the other abbreviations and acronyms aren’t changing our world profoundly. They are. Tech affects everything—work, play, love, politics, art, all of it. But the maximalist version, where robots, equipped with artificial intelligence, are going to replace human workers, is way over done. No doubt they will replace some. But not all. Back in 1987, ancient history… Read More
Rasmus on the attack again
The irrepressible Jack Rasmus, who has never demonstrated any real understanding of how economic statistics are constructed, has a new post claiming that the “real” unemployment rate is more like 10–12% than the officially reported 3.7%. He has a point, even if it’s somewhat overstated. The government’s own broad unemployment rate, U-6, was 7.2% in August, nearly twice the headline rate, though short of the Rasmus rate. (See table A-15 here.) One of the ways the government undercounts the unemployed, says Rasmus, is that the monthly survey “misses a lot of workers… Read More
Responding to Rasmus’s response
Jack Rasmus is out with a response to my critique of his analysis of the April U.S. employment numbers. Enlightening Rasmus looks to be a hopeless case, but since there are may be some onlookers who wonder what’s up, here are a few comments. As with yesterday’s post, his comments are quoted and italicized (though the formatting doesn’t show up on an iPhone unless you choose the desktop version—sorry!). What is significant is that Henwood thinks the CES (Current Employment Survey) is more important and accurate than the CPS (Current Population Survey)…. Read More
Misreading the latest jobs numbers
Z Communications’ resident statistician Jack Rasmus is out with some fresh disinformation about the economic news. It’s been a while since I took his nonsense apart, so this seems like a good opportunity, since his latest looks to be making the rounds. The problems start in the first paragraph (Rasmus is in quoted italics, my comments in Roman.) The just released report on April jobs on first appearance, heavily reported by the media, shows a record low 3.6% unemployment rate and another month of 263,000 new jobs created. But there are two… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 