Another great article from buzz charts about how the media (and of course the dimocrats) have managed to change the debate on the unemployment numbers.
BuzzCharts
Since the president's tax cut was fully implemented last May the unemployment rate has dropped rapidly from 6.3 percent to 5.6 percent today. Everyone knows this. It's one of the fastest declines in unemployment in decades. The problem is, this is a presidential-election year. Hence, improving economic statistics will not be accepted by the mainstream media no matter what those statistics say.
The Bush bashers on radio and television have been saying that unemployment doesn't matter; that its payroll jobs that count. Lou Dobbs, host of CNN's Moneyline, recently said this while debating Steve Forbes on the air. Forbes cited the growth in jobs under the household survey, the survey used to determine the unemployment rate. Dobbs countered, "Who uses the household survey anyway?" The answer, Lou, is that up until the household survey started to show good news, you and almost every other financial journalist in America used it.
Remember how business and financial reporters measured the health of the job market back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s? Right. They used the unemployment rate. In the 1970s they invented a statistic called the "misery index" which added the inflation rate with the (yes, you guessed it) unemployment rate. During the deep recession which occurred between 1981 and '82, before the Reagan tax cuts were officially implemented, the Gipper was hammered with "high unemployment" rates. During the recession of '91, Bill Clinton, by way of a willing media, was able to attack George Herbert Walker Bush using unemployment rates that hovered around 7 percent.
The point here is that the nation has historically focused on the unemployment rate when it comes to measuring the health of the jobs market. All of a sudden, however — just when the unemployment statistics have given us an unbroken series of good tidings — we've seen a switch to the importance of the payroll jobs survey as the preferred metric of the labor climate.