Friday, October 07, 2005

Time For More Funny Numbers

Here is what I noticed from this story:

1) How common a practice is it for any presidential administration to go back and “revise” job estimates that they had already announced? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question. Why would they do it? Has it been done by any administration besides Bushco? Inquiring minds want to know.

2) It is mentioned on two occasions, once in each of the first two paragraphs, that these numbers were affected by the devastation of Hurricane Katrina (the job loss total includes, I’m sure, the 3,000 municipal workers laid off by New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin - update 10/08: and isn't it just precious that there's no problem getting money for "pork" from Congress, but 3,000 people have to lose their jobs because FEMA doesn't have enough scratch? Bushco does it again!). For more overkill, I minimized the window on my PC showing the CNN story and how was the window identified at the status bar at the bottom of the screen? It was called “Katrina-affected September job loss less than forecast.” Gee, do you think something besides Katrina affected the numbers? Do you think it was the fact that THIS ADMINISTRATION HAS DONE SUCH A TERRIBLE JOB OF DEVELOPING GOOD PAYING JOBS WITH GOOD BENEFITS? DO YOU THINK THAT MIGHT HAVE HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT?

(Sorry for the “shouting.”)

3) The justification for the headline of “Job losses not so steep” comes from the fact that ONLY 35,000 jobs were lost in September as opposed to the 150,000 that were projected by “experts.” Only in the through-the-looking-glass world of Bushco could this be considered as progress.

(Actually, as per usual in these types of stories, there are so many statistics being thrown around that it’s very hard to figure out exactly what’s going on anyway, which is completely intentional as far as I’m concerned.)

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