A good conspiracy theory is irrefutable. A bad one usually collapses when confronted by reality.
The claim by some supporters of Republican challenger Mitt Romney that President Barack Obama’s Chicago-based campaign doctored September’s unemployment figures for political gain fall into the second category, according to members of both parties who have served in the government’s economic data system.
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Jack Welch, former chief executive officer of General Electric Co. Photographer: Craig Ruttle/Bloomberg
Jack Welch, the former chief executive officer of General Electric Co. (GE), touched off an Internet-based frenzy yesterday when he suggested on Twitter that Obama’s team lowered the country’s unemployment rate to 7.8 percent to give the president a boost. “Unbelievable jobs numbers. . . these Chicago guys will do anything. . . can’t debate so change numbers,” he wrote.
The charge then was picked up by Arizona Senator John McCain and Florida Representative Allen West, both Republicans.
Welch’s message was re-sent via Twitter 3,832 times, meaning each of those people re-broadcasted it to their groups of followers, in the first 10 hours. Rebuttals posted by journalists on Twitter, including Keith Olbermann and Politico’s Roger Simon, were re-tweeted at least 300 times combined. Representative West’s message of support was re-tweeted 592 times.
‘Too Important’
During a television interview last night, when CNBC host Larry Kudlow said it was unrealistic to allege the White House tampered with the data, Welch tempered his words.
“Let’s hope that’s totally correct, Larry,” Welch said. Still, he said, “This election is too important for one number that might be corrected next month to determine the election. I want to see a real debate about this number.”
Economists, including one who worked for McCain, dismissed the very suggestion that U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics would, or even could, manipulate the data.
The people who compile the numbers “are professionals” and “do this as a career,” said Doug Holtz-Eakin, economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush and the policy director for McCain’s 2008 campaign. “I have a lot of respect for them.”
‘Weird Number’
“I’ve never been one of those who felt that the numbers get doctored,” said Holtz-Eakin. “Like any other enterprise, every now and then you just get a weird number and this one makes no sense.”
Welch, 76, had quickly concluded the opposite.
Five minutes after the U.S. Labor Department reported at 8:30 a.m. that the unemployment rate fell to 7.8 percent last month, Welch pushed the button on his Twitter message. He took aim at the figures that may matter most before Election Day on Nov. 6; the October report due on Nov. 2 may be too late to change voters’ perceptions about the economy.
The Obama administration called the allegation baseless and defended BLS, which computes the figures. Alan Krueger, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told Bloomberg Television that Welch’s remark was “irresponsible.”
“No serious person would question the integrity of the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” Krueger said in the interview. “These numbers are put together by career employees.”
Romney campaign aides said they weren’t disputing the data, keeping their focus on criticism of Obama’s record.
‘Anemic Trend’
“We’re going to address the numbers as they’ve been released,” Romney’s policy director, Lanhee Chen, said on Fox Business. “What you see, as you’ve said on the show, is an anemic trend. This is not a real recovery.”
Gary Sheffer, vice president of communications and public affairs at GE, declined to comment.
Each month, federal agencies, staffed by career civil servants, compile the raw data that eventually become two jobs- day numbers: the unemployment rate and the total number of jobs added to the economy.
It begins on the Sunday of the week that has the 19th in it, with 2,000 Census Bureau workers knocking on 60,000 doors, asking residents if they were employed, or if they were seeking employment, in the last week, said Nancy Potok, the bureau’s associate director, in an interview on July 30.
The bureau has 20 days to complete the survey and send it to the BLS, which then has two or three days to provide the numbers to the Council of Economic Advisers, said Gary Steinberg, a BLS spokesman, in an Aug. 1 interview. Before transmitting the numbers to the CEA, the Census Bureau weights the data to adjust for non-answers and unresponsive households.
Work-Site Questionnaires
At the same time, the BLS is conducting the so-called establishment survey, by sending and receiving questionnaires to 486,000 work sites. The main question that separate survey seeks to answer: how many jobs the work sites had on their payrolls on the 12th of the month.
On the Thursday afternoon before Labor Department’s Friday release of the numbers, the BLS transmits both data sets to the Council of Economic Advisers, over a secure system. It then becomes the CEA chairman’s responsibility to provide the president with the numbers. All the data is transmitted over secure systems and it is often walked to the West Wing by the CEA chairman, Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s previous CEA chairman said in a Sept. 5 interview.
Thirty years ago, few guidelines applied to the release of U.S. economic reports. In 1972, during President Richard Nixon’s term, Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin and chairman of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, called the U.S. data unreliable. He decried “misleading economic indicators,” according to press reports at the time.
Release Manipulated
After an investigation, the committee concluded that the Nixon administration had manipulated the packaging and release of economic data, said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at Economic Outlook Group LLC in Princeton, New Jersey.
Since then, “controls have been increasingly made stricter,” he said.
“There’s no politics that goes into these numbers at all,” he said. “The way the U.S. collects economic statistics is viewed around the world as the gold standard.”
“For sure, some conspiracy theorist will contend that the BLS is cooking the data for political reasons. Such theories are absolutely garbage,” said Ray Stone, managing director of Stone & McCarthy Research Associates in Princeton, New Jersey, in a note to clients. “The BLS never lets politics enter the data.”
“The conspiracy theorists are assuming that the Obama administration would manipulate the data for political purposes,” said Keith Hennessey, Bush’s last director of the National Economic Council. “I assume that the new employment numbers, while a bit surprising, are real.”
Too Many People
“I don’t think they could manipulate it,” said Hennessey, who received the jobs reports on Thursday nights before their release when he was in government. “Too many people would have to be involved and they couldn’t coordinate that many people lying about the data.”
“It would be very difficult,” to manipulate numbers at the BLS, said Elaine Chao, U.S. Labor Secretary from 2001 to 2009.
Ward McCarthy, chief financial economist at Jefferies & Co. in New York, said that the drop in unemployment “stirred up the conspiracy-theory pots.”
While the numbers are unbelievable, “no, we do not think that there has been a Washington conspiracy to ‘cook the books’ as some have claimed,” McCarthy wrote in a note to clients. The numbers, rather, simply don’t reflect current economic conditions, he said.
When asked about Welch’s assertion on CNBC this afternoon, McCain, the Republican presidential nominee four years ago, said, he “wouldn’t put anything past this administration.”
He then added that he was “not enough of an economist” to interpret the jobs data.
To contact the reporters on this story: Hans Nichols in Washington at hnichols2@bloomberg.net; Lorraine Woellert in Washington at lwoellert@bloomberg.net |
发表于 2012-10-6 09:23
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发表于 2012-10-6 11:19
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