Where (are) the data stating that government jobs are decreasing while private sector jobs are increasing? That would be a terrific trend if it were true, but I don't think it is.
Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy
As you wrote in another post, you can find information or claimed information on the Internet to support almost any conclusion about any issue, and there's never a definite correct answer to anything. Except, of course, when there is
. For a completely off-topic example, I believe that writings or speech represented as the work of George Carlin on the website
http://www.georgecarlin.com/ "definitely" originated from George Carlin, and not from someone else trying to pass off their ideas as the work of George Carlin. (As long as that website doesn't get hacked
)
The "definitive", "correct" source of numbers (statistics, data) about employment and other labor statistics in the United States, the data that are quoted by media reports, pored over by economists, and that can move financial markets, are provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), an agency of the US federal government, which of course has its own web site:
http://bls.gov/home.htm "They're from the Government and they're here to help you" with statistics about jobs
- although not (usually) with you finding a job
.
So are the numbers on the BLS web site, which everyone regards as the "definitive" source of employment data, the Truth about the state of US employment, and other related stuff such as wages, hours worked, prices, productivity? I think even BLS spokespeople would admit their numbers are an imperfect representation of the Truth, due to sampling error (the kind of error that occurs in "opinion polls"), other approximations, and the difficulty of understanding something as complicated as a technology-based national economy.
A more interesting question about the BLS numbers that might possibly occur to some people here is: are the published numbers intentionally "biased" or "fixed" in ways advantageous to powerful people or groups (President, Congress, political parties, bankers, business, labor ...). I would be extremely surprised - although I haven't searched - if there aren't any posted claims of bias in BLS data. I'll just observe that, if key people in financial markets came to believe that BLS data is "fixed" - vs an imperfect but honest effort to measure the US economy - that would reduce the ability of the data releases to move markets.
By the way, if you choose not to believe BLS data, then you have no basis for saying "Zero jobs created in August 2011". Of course, you could still make a qualitative statement like "the US employment situation is in the cr#pper" - but the BLS is the source of the numbers everyone cites.
So enough of this rambling, I'm going to post some numbers that I just downloaded from the BLS website, page "Top Picks (Most Requested Statistics)" (
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls). If you want to check my numbers, it will be helpful to have some familiarity with a spreadsheet program - like Microsoft Office / Excel or OpenOffice.org - that can read and do calculations with XLS files. Note, as defined by BLS, "total non-farm employment" = "total private employment" + "total government employment". (Sorry farmers and farmworkers, there are relatively few of you and you're difficult to count.) I'll show cumulative changes in the "total private" and "total government" columns from the end of Feb 2010, when "total non-farm" and "total private" hit a low, to the end of Aug 2011. Sorry, formatting is kind of cruddy because I don't know a quick way to do it better.
CHANGE IN NUMBER OF EMPLOYED PEOPLE (THOUSANDS)
(Date) (Total private) (Total government)
Feb 2010 0 0
Mar 2010 144 48
Apr 2010 373 96
May 2010 421 506
Jun 2010 486 249
Jul 2010 579 107
Aug 2010 689 -62
Sep 2010 798 -200
Oct 2010 941 -172
Nov 2010 1069 -207
Dec 2010 1236 -222
Jan 2011 1330 -248
Feb 2011 1591 -274
Mar 2011 1810 -299
Apr 2011 2051 -323
May 2011 2150 -369
Jun 2011 2225 -424
Jul 2011 2381 -495
Aug 2011 2398 -512
So the same BLS data series people that are talking about when they say "no jobs created in August 2011" shows net change of +2,398,000 private jobs and -512,000 (federal + state + local) government jobs in last 18 months. (By the way, the "bump" in total govt jobs around May 2010 was US Census enumerators and other temporary Census employees.)