The Unemploment Numbers were Cooked

So say the right wing conspiracy people spearheaded by Fake News sorry Fox News. The poster boy for this was Jack Welch who said:

"Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers," Welch tweeted, referring to the site of the Obama campaign headquarters.

This ranks up there with all the polls are rigged. Gee is there a pattern here.

There was a huge push back on this when Welch was interviewed on CNN and MSNBC. Also the Romney campaign would have nothing to do with it. I'm sure they were pissed the number went down because this sort of knocks the wind out of what happened in Denver (but not completely). (Note to Obama please show up at the next debate.)

But for just a moment let's say that somehow the numbers could be manipulated. Here's my question why would you wait until September to do so. In January the unemployment rate was 8.3 %. Wouldn't the smart thing to do if you were going to cook the numbers would be to start lowering the rate in January bringing it down say a tenth of a percent each month. If that had been don,e the September number would have been down to around 7.4%. That would make the Obama administration look just great on the jobs issue.

But I think this latest bout of paranoia by the right can best be summed up this way:

The New York Times’ Joe Nocera writes that while it’s “ludicrous” to suggest that “a handful of career bureaucrats” would manipulate unemployment data, it is true that there’s “something a little strange about the way the country derives its employment statistics.” But the lesson in this questioning of the jobs data needs to be that it’s a bit “absurd” to think that a presidential race could be decided on the unemployment rate. It’s not just because the short-term numbers aren’t really reliable, but also because no president has such a strong grip on the economy.

“There is rough justice in the way things are playing out,” writes Nocera. “Having spent the last year wrongly blaming the president for high unemployment, Republicans can only stand by helplessly as the unemployment rate goes down at the worst possible moment for them.”