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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (2097)	12/9/2003 5:46:50 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Respond to of 90947

okey, 132,560,000 is actually February 2001, not January, but since that was the peak, we'll use that. February 2001: 132,560,000 (peak) July 2003: 129, 846,000 (trough) November 2003: 130,174,000 Now, let's examine your initial statement: "Name one other 3 year period in the past 40 years where the US has lost 3 million jobs?" The job loss based on nonfarm payrolls was 2,714,000. Not quite 3 million, but 90 percent of the way there if you exclude other categories. Is it the largest in the last 40 years? Nope. Look at the same chart: July 1981: 91,594,000 (peak) December 1982: 88,756,000 (trough) Difference: 2,838,000 That's faster than 3 years, with a labor force that was about 20 percent smaller. The 1974-75 trough included a loss of nonfarm payroll jobs of over 2 million, again a larger proportion of the workforce than the current job picture. Other recessions also included job losses that were a more significant percentage of the overall labor force. As for your statement that "other statistics are irrelevant", I disagree. I think the total number of people reporting that they are employed is more significant than parsing out those on a non farm "payroll". Either you are working or you are not, and the numbers I am using include everyone working, while the numbers you are using exclude some based on your notion of what constitutes a "relevant" job (I'll try to remember when I am wolfing down my next meal that people who work on farms are "irrelevant"). You take one number out of many, call it a "gold standard" because it purports to say what you want it to say, ignore all other numbers and fail to adjust for the changes in the size of the labor force, and then still manage to make a statement that is untrue on more than one level (that under Bush nonfarm payrolls have decreased by 3 million and that this has never happened before, when in fact a larger decrease was registered 20 years ago).