10-05-2012, 12:54 PM
|
|
|
Purveyor, Fine Asian Porn
Industry Role:
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: San Francisco Bay Area
Posts: 38,323
|
Quote:
"BLS is not manipulating data. Evidence of such would be a scandal of enormous proportions & loss of credibility," Tony Fratto, former deputy press secretary to President George W. Bush, wrote on Twitter.
Steve Haugen, an economist at the BLS who has been involved in the process of analyzing jobs data for nearly 30 years, flatly dismissed the idea that there was any way the White House or Obama campaign could have had a hand in how the numbers turned out.
"The data are not manipulated for political reasons. I've been involved in the process myself for almost three decades. There's never been any political manipulation of the data, period," Haugen told CBSNews.com.
According to Haugen, the BLS has been getting its data for the household survey -- the one on which the unemployment figure is based -- from the Census Bureau since 1942. The BLS took over the responsibility for analyzing the employment and unemployment data in 1959. And Haugen says that survey used in the data collection process has been largely the same since 1994. The BLS says the White House is not involved in the process of gathering or analyzing data, and does not give directives on the collection, production, dissemination of data.
Asked directly if the Obama administration or the White House had directed the BLS to change its methodology in some way to make the numbers more favorable to the president, Haugen said "no."
In fact, the BLS says it does not at the moment have a single political appointee working in the entire agency.
Haugen explained how the data is collected for the household survey.
"Each month there's a survey of about 50,000 households, or addresses, actually, that are drawn randomly -- a random sample designed to represent the population -- and those data are collected both in person and by phone by Census Bureau interviewers," Haugen said. "The data are collected usually during the calendar week including the 19th of the month. The reference period for the survey -- the questions we're asking about what people are doing -- is related to the calendar week that's the 12th of the month, typically. So there's the interview week, the week of the 19th, then there's the week to process the data and then there's the week we release the data."
|
ADG |
|
|