The Census Bureau certainly knows how to count. That is, after all, what the folks there do for a living. But is Census double counting when it comes to jobs created in the latest polling of America? Or triple counting? Or maybe even counting the same job as many as forty times?
Last week I got a call from Naomi Cohn, an unemployed lawyer from Brooklyn, who decided to apply for a temporary job as an $18.75 an hour enumerator with the Census.
As she told me — and later wrote in the Sunday Post on May 9 — she succeeded. But after three days of paid training, she was only called for 10 hours of work over two days. And nothing since. No explanation.
Cohn said this wasn’t unusual. Many of the 80 others in her training class weren’t getting many hours either.
Granted, this could be quite innocent. Maybe Cohn couldn’t perfect her door-knocking technique — two soft raps followed by another hard one.
Or, maybe something more devious is going on. Since the creation of jobs is and always has been such a hot political issue, I’ll go with the devious explanation every time.
After checking I discovered this. As far as the Labor Department is concerned, a new job is created whenever someone gets as little as one hour of pay for work. In April, for instance, the Labor Department reported that 290,000 new jobs were created by the economy.
There’s no distinction between a one-hour job minding someone’s front desk or a 40-hour shift at the local coal mine. Of those 290,000 jobs, 66,000 were temporary positions created by Census.
So the big question: if the Census Bureau had been giving Naomi and other workers a reasonable number of working hours, how many fewer new jobs would there have been created in April?
Slice one 40-hour job into 40 one-hour jobs and you might be able to report significant employment gains. It’ll all be nonsense, of course.
The benefits of giving Naomi fewer hours and hiring other people to take up the slack would, of course, be politically wise. “We created jobs,” but don’t ask any questions.
As I was investigating this column I got the royal runaround from the Census Bureau. Nobody could explain anything. There was always someone else who had the answer, please stay on the line.
One thing is clear, this is ripe for abuse and it probably is being abused.
And, by the way, The Post paid Naomi much more for the article she wrote than the Census people gave her.
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I didn’t get a chance to analyze the April employment report – which showed growth of 290,000 jobs — because of space limitations but the devil was certainly in the details.
Of that amount, 186,000 came from a guess that small, newly-formed companies were hiring. This guess was sharply higher than one made in April, 2009 that proved totally wrong.
Plus there were the hokey Census jobs I mentioned above.
In short, your suspicions (come on, I know you have them) that job growth really isn’t very good appear valid.
There will be a couple more months of seasonally-adjusted, happy assumptions before we get a real feel for what’s going on.
Meanwhile, the under-employment rate – called U-6 – jumped from 16.9 percent to 17.1 percent in April. This is not a statistic that will rise just because more people are suddenly looking for jobs.
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Someone ought to start paying attention.
Even as the US budget deficit jumped to $82.7 billion in April, Obama administration officials are laying the groundwork for more economic stimulus. (Translation: more spending.)
In April, 2009 the shortfall was a shocking – for then — $20 billion.
Washington usually runs a surplus in April, because annual tax payments are due.
What’s wrong?
Not enough companies are making profits and paying taxes. Not enough people are working, and all those folks who got laid off last year are now getting refunds. Plus Washington continues to spent too much.
$80 billion versus $20 billion!! Think about it.
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Europe is planning to spend $1 trillion to bail out Greece and any other country that falters financially. But where is the money coming from?
Nobody seems to know. Or care.
But it will be a big problem if, like the Federal Reserve did, the $955 billion comes from new currency produced by an overtime run of the printing presses by the European Central Bank. This is innocently called “quantitative easing” but in the olden days it was known as the beginning of rampant inflation. john.crudele@nypost.com