Thanks to Facebook, I can now know when fatcat bankers write blog posts, because there’s always a conservative friend to post it for me. No really, it’s a good thing. I don’t want to become narrow-minded. I welcome a diversity of opinions.
But only when their premises are based on, you know, facts. Not damn lies statistics that said banker pulled out of his nether regions.
The offending post is from no less than the New York Federal Reserve Bank. I’ve ripped apart Fed blog posts before (they’re ridiculously easy) as they’re always incredibly biased. Banks are, after all, stakeholders in our financial system. They’re no less biased about economic policy than labor unions are about minimum wage laws.
So, off our intrepid economists go, waxing mathematical about the Labor Force Participation Rate. Look how it has dropped so! Under Obama, it’s droped by almost 5%. But wait, that’s interesting. This is one of those odd “Percentage of change” charts, not an absolute percentage, and for some reason, 2006 was chosen as the zero baseline. Kind of odd that this moment in time, an economic bubble of gargantuan proportions, was chosen as the “normal” state, isn’t it?
But wait, there’s more from our creative team, one of which looks uncannily like Uncle Rico. Look at all those complex equations they have used to calculate the Labor Force Participation Rate. So is this a metric our smart fellows concocted? Actually, according to Wikipedia, it’s a common economic statistic, and apparently, it’s neither calculated nor measured they way they present it.
Shockingly, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics publishes data and charts for this very metric. Of course, they allow you to see the long-term trend, that the Labor Force Participation Rate has declined since 2009 by less than 2%. Thanks to Wikipedia, we know that this statistic doesn’t include the discouraged who have stopped looking for jobs. And due to the increased numbers of new jobs, we know that over the last few months, more and more people have entered the labor force to begin looking for jobs again. So it’s really not surprising to see this stay flat or even take a slight dip. In fact, it’s expected.
Instead, the New York Fed seems more interested in publishing its made-up propoganda about how bad things are under Obama. Because they would have nothing to gain from a Republican candidate that promises less regulation and less oversight over the financial industry, right?
