Republicans who know WTF they are talking about are in bold red.
Welch Conspiracy Theory on Jobs Data Not Tied to Reality - Bloomberg
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 Obamas Chicago-based campaign doctored Septembers unemployment figures for political gain fall into the second category, according to members of both parties who have served in the governments economic data system.
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 Obamas team lowered the countrys unemployment rate to 7.8 percent to give the president a boost. Unbelievable jobs numbers. . . these Chicago guys will do anything. . . cant debate so change numbers, he wrote. ...
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. ...
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 McCains 2008 campaign. I have a lot of respect for them. ...
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 bureaus 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.
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 Departments 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 chairmans 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, Obamas previous CEA chairman said in a Sept. 5 interview. ...
Theres no politics that goes into these numbers at all, [Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at Economic Outlook Group LLC] 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. ...
I dont think they could manipulate it, said [Keith] Hennessey, [Bushs last director of the National Economic Council], 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 couldnt 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.
Welch Conspiracy Theory on Jobs Data Not Tied to Reality - Bloomberg