A lot of part-time jobs came out of the woodwork in September if the most recent stats from the Labor department are legit. The unemployment rate ticked down 30 basis points from 8.1% to 7.8%, but it was driven by over a half-million new part-time jobs showing up.
That seems fishy, and conservatives are crying foul and the MSM is calling them truthers and conspiracy theorists. Both might be right; the numbers are fishy, but it's likely not some cabal of liberal stats folks cooking the books.
As a tweak of the old saw goes, don't chalk up to malice what can be better explained by dumb luck; if you were going to fudge the numbers, you wouldn't throw in a huge outlier like that. At least that's how I would do it if I wanted to make the boss look good; this one is too odd to be made-up, unless it's being fudged by someone who knows nothing about labor economics.
Since the household survey used is essentially a poll, it is vulnerable to outliers from time to time. Conservative should just let it go at that and just hammer the point that the numbers took a tick in the right direction with part-time employment being the driver.
Pretty compelling commentary over at the New York Times.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/explaining-the-big-gain-in-job-getters/
Posted by: NKR | October 05, 2012 at 07:25 PM