Shrewdly, Jack conflates and confuses two different issues. Whether the BLS numbers are perfectly accurate—and since they’re estimates, they’re not—and whether, as he originally charged, President Obama’s campaign staff somehow manipulated the results. Since he’s “right” that the BLS estimates are estimates, that proves that he’s right about everything else is well. And anyone who says different is a communist.*
As people so often do when they don’t like the results of surveys, Welch refers to BLS’s own caveats as to the limitations of survey data to “prove” that the BLS estimates can’t show such a dramatic drop (of 0.3 percentage points in one month). If, in fact, he bothered to read the caveats objectively, he’d know that the decline is just as likely to be larger than 0.3 percentage points as it is to be smaller.
Naturally, he supplements this skepticism, which surely would not have surfaced if the numbers had been the other way around, with seat of the pants experience, most notably, this whopper:
I know I’m not the only person hearing these numbers and saying, “Really? If all that’s true, why are so many people I know still having such a hard time finding work? Why do I keep hearing about local, state and federal cutbacks?”
*But not, apparently, a Nazi. I guess that the difference between a multi-millionaire like Jack and an outright billionaire like Leon Cooperman.
