How much should we let job reports influence our voting
decision? This is something that Joe Nocera of The New York Times wonders as
well. Joe Nocera joined The Opinion pages for the Times in 2011, but he had
already had a few decades in the business. Nocera began his career working as a
writer/editor in 1978 as an editor at The Washington Monthly. In all of his
time in the business, he has never worked for Fox News, which speaks of his
credibility immediately. Despite my jokes, he did ask a good question in his recent article, Job Reports - Cooked or Correct? for the New York Times – just how
much should we value the new employment statistics.
Of course now that we are full on in the campaign to
elections, many “new” facts and data are showing up all over the web. The fact
that the new job boost statistics appear in the media after Obama’s poor
showing at the debate is no accident. But just how reliable are these numbers
and where did they come from? Are these numbers pure imagination? Joe Nocera
doesn’t think so based on the fact that these numbers come from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, where our trusty government officials have secure jobs
regardless of the findings. So, why is there such a discrepancy? Well it seems
that the reports come from two separate surveys, one called the establishment
report, which surveys businesses, and a second that surveys 55,000 households.
No matter how many economists were asked, none could seem to explain the
variation. However, the bigger question is this…should we base our vote for our
next president based on job statistics? Do these numbers even matter?
