Our "
liberal media" strikes again:
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to
September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from
Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September —
might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable
source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau
had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment
report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the
economy.
And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one
employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking
reelection in 2012 and continues today.
Please note the bolded part there. In 2010, a Census Bureau found "an employee",
singular, who was making up stuff to meet his quota.
That magically becomes "Obama has been faking all jobs numbers since 2010."
Hell, even Doug Mataconis calls bullshit on it.
Quite obviously the report has gotten considerable attention in the conservative blogosphere, and it’s easy to see how this could eventually become the kind of scandal that ended up before a House Subcommittee in the same manner that things like the Fast & Furious gun running story, the Behghazi attack, and the IRS targeting story have. Indeed, I’d almost guarantee that this is what’s going to happen eventually. Looking at the report in more detail, however, it’s quite apparent that there’s a lot less here than the Post headline, and much of the blog coverage, would have you believe, something that both Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal and James Pethokoukis of the conservative American Enterprise Institute have pointed out today.
For example, the Post report indicates that this entire story about possible fabrication of census data actually goes back to 2010, two years before the Presidential election. This suggests that the allegations, if true, are more about institutional problems at the Census Department than some kind of conspiracy to aid the Obama campaign. Second, Second, as Weisenthal notes, to the extent that this Census employee Buckmon that is quoted as a source is claiming he was pressured, it was a pressure to produce reports, not a pressure to produce reports saying that he had interviewed people who were employed. He could’ve just as easily handed in reports saying, falsely, that he had talked to people who reported that they were unemployed. Third, as both Weisenthal and Pethokoukis point out, the problem of under-reporting that led to pressure from the Labor Department was apparently limited to New York and Philadelphia, but the figures for those areas for September 2012 actually show the unemployment rate rising rather than falling, so it’s unclear how this could have led to the national rate falling by 0.2%. Finally, as Weisenthal points out, while the September 2012 report seemed odd at the time, it was in fact overall consistent with how unemployment has trended in the year that has followed.
But hey, this is the new SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY so whatever. Dude, even
Pethokoukis is shaking his head at this nonsense. But let's waste valuable taxpayer dollars on hearings and stuff.
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