..in honor of the May jobs figures, of course.
Reportedly, the economy gained 430,000 jobs last month according to the BLS. But that is where the good news comes to a screeching halt. Turns out that some 411,000 of these jobs were owed to census hiring. in other words, this month, 95% of the new jobs created (or saved?) were gummint jobs. Of course, the census jobs will be vaporizing shortly; I'm praying for sometime around August or September just in time for the clown troupe in Washington to deal with the newly burgeoning unemployment stats and angry voters. Over at The Hill, Armstrong Williams assesses the effort to pad the jobs numbers with temporary hires:
You guessed it, the Census Bureau put several hundred thousand to work last month — a figure that will certainly skew the final calculus and present a picture that would make Joe Biden proud. Never mind that those jobs are temporary; and already, Census workers are wondering aloud on blog and social media sites if they're eligible for unemployment benefits. You must be kidding me. Could we end up spending more taxpayer dollars to give these workers benefits they're not entitled to? Did the bean counters at OMB forecast for these conditions if some court gets happy and decides the workers should receive yet another handout?
But O-Job's census people (he tried to get them under his control, remember?) can't even get that right. The 411,000 census jobs that they are trying to spin are purportedly repeat hires according to the New York Post yesterday:
Mike says that after each stint with Census he, like everyone else, was given an official "termination" notice. And every time he was rehired Mike had to fill out a new employment application (more paperwork to be processed by paid workers).
A couple weeks ago I found out that Census was repeatedly hiring and firing workers without any apparent reason. I questioned if this was being done to artificially boost the nation's employment figures since the Labor Dept. considers it a new job created whenever someone is hired to work as little as one hour in a month.
Was Census churning jobs to make the economy look healthier than it really is?
Still, in light of this, the chief idiot just keeps flapping his gums, promising his head-up-their-ass followers there's light at the end of the tunnel and it ain't the 3:10 to Yuma:
President Barack Obama says the addition of 431,000 new jobs in May shows "the economy is getting stronger by the day."
Speaking at a trucking company outside Washington, Obama embraced the Labor Department's new employment snapshot, released Friday morning. A burst of census hiring lifted payrolls last month, and the unemployment rate dipped to 9.7 percent.
Obama notes that the economy has seen job gains for five straight months after devastating losses from the recession. He says the recovery is still in its early stages, and that it will be uneven in the months ahead.
The president says that even though the census jobs are only temporary, private sector hiring is growing, too.
By the way, as long as we're talking about padding numbers, let's check in with James O'Keefe -- the Acorn Slayer -- on how the newly hired census workers are encouraged to pad their time sheets:
..your taxes at work. Ain't a government job grand?
CULTURAL NOTE: For those of you who remember Woodstock and the flurry of after-market adulation for some of the more tangential groups appearing there will remember Sha Na Na, the New York City 50s R'n'R and Dew-wop singers. Yes, this song by the Silhouettes is where they got their name.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey, over at Hot Air! has a great post that discusses and depicts the results this kind of padding and short term planning yields. Consider the ill-fated Cash for Clunkers program of last year. The following is a graph of motor vehicle sales during for 2008 through the present.Note how the spike in car sales are immediately followed by a mirror-image dip:
Instant results..here and now..screw the downstream consequences. You know, like that bumper sticker so popular with the baby-boomer and subsequent generations:
I want Instant Gratification..
..and I want it NOW!
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