Wow! Is President Obama lucky, or what?
It was announced Friday that the nation’s unemployment rate declined a stunning 0.3 percentage points in September to 7.8 percent. So just days after a thoroughly panned performance in a national debate with Mitt Romney, the president can now show off unexpectedly good news about the economy.
Lucky, or what?
Probably “what.” The 873,000-job gain in September followed a 119,000 loss of jobs in August. That sort of turnaround is just too unbelievable and it is probably not to be believed.
When they were called by the Labor Department, 142,000 additional people claimed to be self-employed. So, in August, did all those people who were out of work suddenly get the urge to go into business for themselves?
How? What kind of business? Or, were they just making this up so they’d look better to the surveyors?
And this one will cause you to have a bald spot: 368,000 people aged 20 to 24 years old said they suddenly found work in September. This group had lost jobs in August and the figure was so out of the ordinary that John M. Galvin, acting commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, saw fit to note it in his comments Friday.
But the Labor Department couldn’t, or didn’t, explain what was going on.
Here’s my thought. People between 20 and 24 years old typically work on political campaigns. So maybe employment in this age group surged because President Obama was hiring campaign workers.
The irony, of course, is that the president could be not only the beneficiary of this hiring boom but also the employer responsible for it.
There’s a punch line in all this. If the improvement in the jobless rate really was a fluke of seasonal adjustments and the result of campaign hiring, then it should reverse itself next month.
And President Obama might be faced with a horrible jobless number just days before the election.