11.04.10

What the Census Man Knew

Posted in Census at 8:12 am by George Smith

From the Associated Press:

The number of people seeking jobless benefits jumped sharply last week, after two straight weeks of declines.

The increase undermines hopes that unemployment claims, after falling four times in the previous five weeks, were on a sustained downward trend. That would signal layoffs were slowing and hiring was picking up. Instead, claims remain stuck at an elevated level.

For logistical reasons having to do with how unemployment claims are processed and the slow pace of payroll tax reporting by the federal government in various states, some of these results must inevitably be due to census workers claims just now working through the system.

Today, DD writes in a big feature for The Register:

The results from the US 2010 Decennial Census are guaranteed by the end of the year. However, those who collected it – called enumerators – already know quite a bit about the state of the nation. There’s no good news …

Census employment was the only bright spot in the US economy this year. It showed solid results when the army of enumerators went into the field. The president mentioned the more positive employment statistics sometime in late May-early June. Paradoxically, since the statistics lagged the real world, by the time he said it, the census was busy laying off as many people as it could in Pasadena.

The rest of the article is here.

Read it. Pass it around.

And don’t forget the comments.

They’re fabulous. If only because they show absolutely nothing has changed.

The election brought out the crazies. And the crazies, with the same political beliefs as the census-dodgers, thought they were going to win big time, sweeping everything in their path.

They did not. And many of the most famous nutcases lost. But they’re still around, fuming and swearing they were delivered a mandate by the people. And the very close result splits in places like Pennsylvania show the great and irreconcilable divisions between our tribes.

The census operation showed a way forward early in the year. It demonstrated how people could be put back to work for productive purpose. It put money in their pockets, money they spent in the regions in which they lived, and it sustained demand as long as it was in place. There are facts.

And then it was gone.

Krugman wrote yesterday:

If Obama had used fancy footwork and 2 AM sessions to pass a big public works program, and this program had brought unemployment down, Republicans would be screaming about the process — and Democrats would have comfortably held control of Congress. Remember the voter backlash against the way Medicare drug benefits were passed? Neither do I.

Census employment, while coincidental to the times, showed a result.

It demonstrated unequivocally how hundreds of thousands of Americans could be put to work to capably do productive work for the country.

The Register article on it is here.

NB: We didn’t care what our co-workers politics were in census-land.

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