Birth/Death Model Responsible For Over 50% of New Imaginary Jobs

07-09-2011 • ZeroHedge.com

o what does the BLS tell us to do when attempting to eliminate the B/D benefit? Simple: add or subtract the B/D adjustment from the Non-Seasonally Adjusted number. Yet when doing it on a quantized, monthly basis this is impossible due to the abovementioned layering of the seasonal adjustment. Well, there is a very simple workaround: just look at the Year over Year change in the Non-Seasonally adjusted numbers. After all that will eliminate all the intrayear seasonal adjustments, leaving just two clean numbers at the beginning and end of the full year sequence. This works like a charm when looking at June 2010 and June 2011 numbers, on both a Seasonal and Non-Seasonally Adjusted basis. The difference in the NSA series is 1,171K jobs, while the SA is 1,036K, almost a perfect match. And after all we have been hearing for so long how the administration has added 1 million jobs in the past year. Luckily, now that we have a benchmark that does not need a seasonal adjustment, we can determine precisely what the Birth-Death contribution to the "jobs added" over the past year has been. The result: 606K, or 52% of the NSA jobs added (and 58% of the actual, seasonally adjusted jobs).