Opinion: The jobs report shows why the White House should stop touting its 'economic miracle'
Visitors to the Pittsburgh veterans job fair at Heinz Field meet with recruiters. By Catherine Rampell Catherine Rampell Columnist covering economics, public policy, politics and culture Email Bio Follow Columnist March 8 at 1:57 PM Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for this White House to stop selectively celebrating really noisy or possibly-anomalous-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness statistics. Especially ones that can easily reverse themselves, as we saw happen Friday.
Those who follow the Labor Department’s monthly jobs reports — as I have now for more than a decade — know they are extremely noisy. That is, they bounce around a ton from month to month, and the margin of error in the payroll jobs number is plus or minus about 115,000. So, way above-trend numbers for one month could be the start of a new “miracle” boom, but they are more likely to be an aberration that could quickly reverse itself.
This administration, of course, has no qualms about touting noisy, possibly anomalous numbers when they show good news. And what happens when the data — somewhat inconveniently — show bad news?That’s what happened Friday, after the Labor Department released its jobs report for February. Faced with this news, the White House released an analysis emphasizing February wage growth. What about that lackluster headline 20,000 payroll jobs number? Funnily enough, the White House suggested the public shouldn’t worry, because it was merely one month and the year-long average was still good.
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