Straight (?) Reporting On The August Employment Number

From Bloomberg.com, here’s the straight skinny:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the U.S. economy added 169,000 jobs in August. That’s less than the 180,000 expected by economists surveyed by Bloomberg, and also less than the average increase of 184,000 jobs over the past 12 months. Revisions to the data from June and July also mean that there are 74,000 fewer people working than reported earlier. The unemployment rate fell because workers, including those between the ages of 25 and 54, continued to drop out of the labor force.

BUT IN THE SAME ITEM (same link as in the initial words of this blog entry) –

Jim Tankersley at the Washington Post had a better idea: the U.S. porn industry stopped working for a week after an actress tested positive for HIV. Once it became clear that no one else had the disease, work resumed. The one-week shutdown would affect the jobs numbers for the month of August but tells us nothing about the broader state of the U.S. economy. Had those 22,000 people been working, employment growth in August would have modestly beaten expectations. Fed officials are probably writing off this month’s weakness for that very reason.

Something is wrong here. NO, not the PORN angle.

The very idea that 22,000 people employed — more or less — could MEAN SOMETHING in an economy with 310 million citizens!

Source: http://electricalcontractor.com/?p=10970

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