The Mathemagics Behind the Unemployment Rate

Four words: Jobs, jobs, jobs (That’s 4, right?)

All righty then: we’ve spent the last year talking about the OWIES esprit de corp, the R-Word’s War on Women, Sandra Fluke’s bloomers, Big Guy’s swankie Frankie fetish, hoodies and racist white Hispanics, composite girls from the past, and oh –  did you hear?  Big Guy killed Osama Bin Laden? Yup, he just whacked him:

Oh sure, he had an assist from those little people, who, as he likes to put it "are out there fighting on my behalf.”  Butt basically, yup, he just whacked him. And George W. Bush didn’t.

Neither did Mitt Romney.

Anyway, with everything that’s been going on it’s been hard to find time to talk about some of the other transformational issues that we care so much about. In fact, it’s been so long since we last hyped our Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! plan that some people have actually forgotten that the Do-Nothing Congress has dropped the ball. They haven’t done anything about recharging our Volt’s batteries so we can drive our economy out of the ditch. Heck, sometimes even Big Guy forgets how bad it is out there.

So maybe that’s why I’m getting so much mail about the economy lately.

Or maybe it has something to do with America’s growing unease over a world-wide recession spurred by France’s recent surrender to a socialist regime. Again.

Cheese eating surrender monkeys!

I know Lady M wasn’t happy about the outcome of the French election. She’d just gotten to the point where she liked the new Carla and all of her chipmunk pouches :

and now there’s a new French hottie on the world stage that she has to deal with.

Valerie Rottweiler, new Queen of France

So we’ve been going through an awful lot of Cheetos around here. And, as it turns out, apparently you CAN reverse a tummy tuck with enough Cristal, foie gras and Kobe sliders.

  Drop that camera and step away from the FLOTUS!    h/t: Krista     

So anyway I thought I’d take today’s lull in big news as an opportunity to respond to one of the most frequently asked questions I get in my mail bag.

“MOTUS, everybody I know has lost their job and nobody can find another one. Butt the unemployment rate keeps going down! What’s up with that? I feel really stoopid, can you explain exactly how Big Guy calculates the unemployment rate?”

Let’s have a little Travelling Music, shall we?

That Old Black Magic: Sammy Davis Jr.

That’s a very astute observation, and a very good question! And today I’m going to explain how it’s done with a little government secret I like to call “Mathemagics!” ®

The Mathemagics of Obamanomics

NOTE: Big Guy’s mathemagics ® are in no way related to Granny R’s rumored (and officially denied) practice of the voodoo black arts.

Although I understand that her powers may be employed in the upcoming election since we need everyone onboard in order to “get out the vote.”

And don’t ask me again how she does it because I’ve already filed an official, plausible denial.

Anyhoo, back to my topic for today. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is Team-Obama’s Ministry of Employment Propaganda source of information regarding Big Guy’s job creation initiative. It is their job to gin up publish statistics showing how Big Guy has pulled our economy out of the ditch George W. Bush and the other R-Words drove us into.

Bureaucrats in the Bureau of Labor Statistics: emphasis on “bureau” and “statistics”

You can go to the BLS website for the official obfuscation explanation of how it’s done, or you can save yourself the frustration and rely on my simplified version of the complex statistical scam calculation.

First, the unemployment rate is made up calculated by dividing the number of persons who do not have jobs AND who are actively looking for work, by the number of persons in the total civilian labor force. Simple, no? Well, you’d think so, butt like everything in government, it’s not as easy as it should be seems.

First, it depends on the season. Is it cold outside, or hot? Is it planting or harvesting season? Road construction season, graduation season, or – as it is currently - historic, first re-election season? The season is important since the official unemployment rate can rise and fall (as needed) depending on the time of year. For example, in winter you don’t need as many people to do your yard work or set up tents for graduation parties, so the unemployment rate rises.

Translation for the gringos:

I voted for Obama

I didn’t think he’d kill the American economy.

I am so, so very sorry!!!

Butt we “adjust” for that and lower it back down again so the numbers won’t look so bad seasonal.

The unemployment rate falls during the summer months because your lawn needs mowing, leaves need blowing and farmers need workers to plant tax subsidized seed corn, in order to produce cornahol so we can save the planet. So, we don’t have to fudge “adjust” the numbers as much in the summer. Our seed corn subsidy also goes for corn that’s turned into fructose corn syrup, butt Lady M doesn’t want you to eat that anymore. So I guess now we can make more cornahol and transfer our reliance on foreign sources of oil to reliance on foreign sources of fructose corn syrup.

During our historic re-election season, the unemployment rate drops faster than Sandra Fluke’s bloomers in order to help Big Guy Win The Future. For America.

WTF?

Ok, I understand, butt it is starting to get complicated. Stick with me; we’re still working thought the mathemagics!

 

See?

Our BLS nerds take the hard numbers: the size of the labor force and the number of unemployed persons, and fudge adjust them to reflect the most advantageous accurate unemployment rate for that moment in time. They call “a whole bunch of” households and ask if anybody who lives there is unemployed, and if so, are they enjoying Big Guy’s generous unemployment compensation gift? Are they actively looking for a job or have they just given up any HOPE of ever finding a job again?

Homeless and HOPEless

All the people who have given up HOPE, together with all the people whose unemployment gifts welfare benefits have expired (times 10³⁾, are promptly and permanently removed from the labor force. This makes the denominator (that’s the bottom number in a fraction for Rush’s friends in Rio Linda) smaller relative to the numerator. And that results in a lower unemployment rate! Just like that. Shazam!

 

It’s just like taking a poll: you call the right people, ask the right questions and ipso fatso, you get the right answer - every time! Take it from me, by September, we’ll throw enough people out of the work force create enough jobs to get the unemployment rate down to around 1.5%.

    I’ll Buh-rock your vote, baby!       h/t: Ironic Surrealism

At which point the economic engine will be back on track, our high speed intercontinental railroad will be roaring along the highspeed internet just looking for the right off ramp to jump the track and WTF.

Hey! Where did all that manure come from?   h/t SadHill

So don’t worry, we are on correct path now, comrades. WTF.     h/t Vereteno

Linked by: Larwyn’s Linx on Doug Ross@Journal, and American Digest, and Clarice on JustOneMinute, and Adrienne’s Corner, and  NOBO2012 on Free Republic, and MRM on twitter, Thanks!