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Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.
President Obama should remember that as he quotes the latest unemployment statistics during these last few days of campaigning. In fact, he better hope nobody looks at the numbers too closely.
Here are the basics you’ll see in other newspapers.
The Labor Dept. reported that payroll employment increased by 171,000 jobs in October and the unemployment rate was “essentially unchanged” at 7.9 percent.
That number of new jobs was better than expected. But since 150,000 or so new positions are needed each month just to absorb people first entering the work force, the kind of growth we saw in October — years after the recession ended — is still dismal and should get someone fired.
At this rate, it’ll take a decade to get back the 6 million jobs that we’ve lost since the financial crisis.
At 7.9 percent, the unemployment rate is extremely high for an incumbent President to overcome. But if you look deeper into the government’s numbers, the broader unemployment rate is even worse: 14.6 percent.
That larger figure includes people who are “marginally attached” to the labor force and those who want full-time work but can find only part- time employment.
Add to that all the people who have completely given up looking for work — and, therefore, aren’t counted anymore by Uncle Sam as unemployed — and the jobless figure would probably be over 20 percent.
That’s one in five Americans, for crying out loud.
But let me get to the part of the statistics where the President got real lucky.
My regular readers should already know the difference between seasonally adjusted figures and the raw numbers that aren’t adjusted.
Seasonal adjustments are done for legitimate reasons. They are meant to adjust for iirregular patterns of employment (holiday retail help) and unemployment (teachers off for the summer).
Without the smoothing effect of seasonal adjustments all government stats would bounce around like Dolly Parton’s chest in a Jeep.
And year-to-year these seasonal adjustments should be consistent — although sometimes, like this past October, they appear to go haywire.
And in October’s case, they provided a very lucky, very timely bounce for the President.
Here’s what I mean.
If you look it up, the unadjusted job growth this October was 911,000 jobs. After seasonal adjustments, that number became the 171,000 number in all the headlines.
In October 2011, the unadjusted gain in jobs was 895,000 — only 16,000 fewer than 911,000.
But seasonal adjustments last year produced a headline number of 80,000 added jobs — later revised to 112,000.
My point: the adjusted job growth figure — 171,000 — that you see in today’s headlines and on which President Obama will be campaigning is way out of proportion with the 80,000 headline number reported last October even though the unadjusted figures for the two Octobers show only a 16,000 difference.
So, if the seasonal adjustment had stayed exactly the same from one October to the next, Labor yesterday could have reported as little as 96,000 new jobs.
That would have been a disaster for President Obama.
So he’s pretty lucky, don’t you think?
Because I’m not an imbecile, I asked Labor the obvious question: could someone have tampered with the seasonal adjustments?
“No, it’s really not possible,” said someone who knows the numbers well and says the discrepancies I noted weren’t much different from other years. “You can’t expect much stability” in the numbers,” he said.
President Obama should play MegaMillions tonight. Because the man is on a lucky streak — at least until Tuesday.