-Crudele plays to a dumbass suspicion of pointy-heads and -bean-counters which is completely wrong. The adjustments and -imputations produce a more accurate picture of what's going on than -the raw numbers would, and to stoke suspicions like Crudele does is a -real disservice.
No, he plays to the suspicions of people that anything put out by the Executive branch under Bush is likely to be a self-serving lie. You happen to believe that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has maintained its impeccable independence under Bush.
>They're better than they ever were. Recent benchmark revisions, which
>are based on near=100% coverage of the employment universe (through
>unemployment insurance records) have been very small, much smaller
>compared to those of 10 years ago, when the BLS used a different
>method of estimating business startups and failures.
I'm not even sure what you mean that unemployment insurance gives you proof of accuracy. Large numbers of people laid off never qualify for or apply for unemployment insurance, including the self-employed and a range of other folks. So if that is the benchmark for double-checking the BLS numbers, that hardly restores my confidence.
I'm not actually arguing-- and neither was Crudele -- that the overall jobs survey numbers are inaccurate over time, just that the swings month to month may be distorted by these statistical adjustements. Maybe he's wrong and maybe he's right-- but he's done a better job of predicting both the rise and fall in the job numbers in the last year based on his analysis of this problem that most mainstream forecasters.
Nathan Newman