# Jack Welch: pure projection? **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [October 6, 2012, 8:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936 "2012-10-06T20:46:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [October 9, 2012, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/61 "2012-10-09T21:06:32Z")
> [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](#): > > [LINK](http://www.salon.com/2012/10/05/neutron_jacks_back/) > > I’m sure you’ve seen or heard about the former GE head charging that Obama influenced the Department of Labor to produce the 7.8% UE figure to help him win the election. When asked, he said he’d stand by his accusation but admitted that he had no evidence to support it. Numerous economists (some right-wing) have argued that there is no way Obama could have exerted the slightest pressure to do anything of the kind (and if he had, it would be an election-blowing scandal–would a sane person risk an election he was leading in?) so my question remains for you armchair shrinks out there–isn’t this the most naked sort of projection, wherein Welch (who sounds btw as if his testicles have been removed–what a squeaky voice!) assumes that is what happened because that is what he would have tried to do in Obama’s place? The BLS is a pretty unimpeachable source. Conservatives are big fans when the unemployment numbers go up and harsh critics when it goes down. Its almost like they WANT unemployment to keep going up. Conservatives spend a lot of time going on and on about how the BLS isn’t taking into account the underemployed and the folks that drop out of the labor market as if they were using a different yardstick for Obama than hey have used for any other president. Isn’t this the same yardstick they used for Ronald Reagan? > [@adaher](#): > > We wouldn’t, if Democrats would be honest about it. Liberals on discussion boards are perfectly happy to support Medicare Advantage cuts. Democrats on the campaign trail not so much. Instead, it’s just “overpayments”, which nevertheless will cause a lot of plans to fold. And that can’t happen in October. A lot of plans can’t sustain themselves without overpayments, how do you justify paying 15% more for a medicare advantage beneficiary than a regular medicare beneficiary? The rest of your post is conspiracy theory. > [@adaher](#): > > And it’s the kind of thing the media would harp on if Republicans were cutting PBS and merely saying they were cutting “overpayments to public corporations”. Not if they were actually overpayments. If PBS received more funding per broadcast hour than ABC, CBS, NBC or FOX raised in revenue per broadcast hour, then sure, they should get cut. Jack Welch and Donald Trump no longer have any credibility. I wonder how long before Jack Welch starts “just asking questions” about Obama’s birth certificate. ---
**Author:** ![LonghornDave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@LonghornDave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonghornDave)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2012, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/62 "2012-10-10T15:52:05Z")
Although this thread seems to have completely moved off topic, this seems to be the best place for this. [Jack Welch: I Was Right About That Strange Jobs Report](http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444897304578046260406091012.html?mg=reno64-wsj) The charge relates primarily to three numbers not passing his personal bullshit test. [Quote=Jack Welch] In August, the labor-force participation rate in the U.S. dropped to 63.5%, the lowest since September 1981. By definition, fewer people in the workforce leads to better unemployment numbers. That’s why the unemployment rate dropped to 8.1% in August from 8.3% in July. Meanwhile, we’re told in the BLS report that in the months of August and September, federal, state and local governments added 602,000 workers to their payrolls, the largest two-month increase in more than 20 years. And the BLS tells us that, overall, 873,000 workers were added in September, the largest one-month increase since 1983, during the booming Reagan recovery. These three statistics—the labor-force participation rate, the growth in government workers, and overall job growth, all multidecade records achieved over the past two months—have to raise some eyebrows. There were no economists, liberal or conservative, predicting that unemployment in September would drop below 8%. [/QUOTE] Combined with the statement that the BLS process is not very scientific. [QUOTE=Jack Welch] Let’s get real. The unemployment data reported each month are gathered over a one-week period by census workers, by phone in 70% of the cases, and the rest through home visits. In sum, they try to contact 60,000 households, asking a list of questions and recording the responses. Some questions allow for unambiguous answers, but others less so. For instance, the range for part-time work falls between one hour and 34 hours a week. So, if an out-of-work accountant tells a census worker, “I got one baby-sitting job this week just to cover my kid’s bus fare, but I haven’t been able to find anything else,” that could be recorded as being employed part-time. The possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process is so pervasive that the BLS’s own “Handbook of Methods” has a full page explaining the limitations of its data, including how non-sampling errors get made, from “misinterpretation of the questions” to “errors made in the estimations of missing data.” Bottom line: To suggest that the input to the BLS data-collection system is precise and bias-free is—well, let’s just say, overstated. [/QUOTE] He shouldn’t have stated it in such a conspiracy theory type manner, but I don’t think it’s exactly that crazy to question the numbers. They do sound unbelievable and are probably likely to get revised in the future. ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2012, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/63 "2012-10-10T16:00:23Z")
So where exactly do the “Chicago guys” fit into the picture? What this idiot is saying is that the 7.8 estimate of the UE numbers for September could be off by a marginal amount, but what he’s NOT acknowledging is that the previous month’s 8.1, or last year’s 8.5 could just as well have been too high to the same degree. ---
**Author:** ![LonghornDave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@LonghornDave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LonghornDave)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2012, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/64 "2012-10-10T16:06:36Z")
> [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](#): > > So where exactly do the “Chicago guys” fit into the picture? > > What this idiot is saying is that the 7.8 estimate of the UE numbers for September could be off by a marginal amount, but what he’s NOT acknowledging is that the previous month’s 8.1, or last year’s 8.5 could just as well have been too high to the same degree. Well, like I just said, he shouldn’t have stated it in a conspiracy theory manner. I also don’t think it is relevant to his point that previous months could be off. He’s not questioning 7.8% in a vacuum. He is questioning the one (and two) month change. It doesn’t matter what the baseline is in that instance. The question boils down to questioning how we would possibly have the largest single month change in employment since 1983 when everyone agrees that we are in a slow recovery and not a single economist predicted anything even close to this. ---
**Author:** ![VinylTurnip](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/b2d939/32.png) [@VinylTurnip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/VinylTurnip)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2012, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/65 "2012-10-10T16:17:38Z")
Welch also said this: > [@](#): > > The good news is that the current debate has resulted in people giving the whole issue of unemployment data more thought. Moreover, it led to some of the campaign’s biggest supporters admitting that the number merited a closer look—and even expressing skepticism. The New York Times in a Sunday editorial, for instance, acknowledged the 7.8% figure is “partly due to a statistical fluke.” Wow, even the _NYT_ [agrees with him](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/opinion/sunday/better-news-on-jobs.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&_r=0)! Those books are totally cooked, right? > [@The New York Times Editorial Page](#): > > The unemployment rate fell, from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent last month, a welcome drop, though it appears to be partly due to a statistical fluke and partly to more part-time employment, which is better than no work, but hardly the sign of a reliably robust job market. > > What it does not reflect, as some conservative commentators have charged, is manipulation of the data by the Obama administration, an allegation that insults federal statisticians and only shows how desperately Republicans want bad economic numbers to use to attack the president. ---
**Author:** ![waterj2](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/858c86/32.png) [@waterj2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/waterj2)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2012, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/66 "2012-10-10T22:48:25Z")
> [@LonghornDave](#): > > Although this thread seems to have completely moved off topic, this seems to be the best place for this. > > [Jack Welch: I Was Right About That Strange Jobs Report](http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444897304578046260406091012.html?mg=reno64-wsj) > > The charge relates primarily to three numbers not passing his personal bullshit test. Why don’t we go up to the beginning of that very article to see if Jack Welch blows his credibility completely out of the water before we worry about what passes his personal bullshit test: > [@Jack Welch](#): > > Imagine a country where challenging the ruling authorities—questioning, say, a piece of data released by central headquarters—would result in mobs of administration sympathizers claiming you should feel “embarrassed” and labeling you a fool, or worse. > > Soviet Russia perhaps? Communist China? Nope, that would be the United States right now, when a person (like me, for instance) suggests that a certain government datum (like the September unemployment rate of 7.8%) doesn’t make sense. Calling Jack Welch a fool is, in Jack Welch’s world, just like the Gulags. ---
**Author:** ![fumster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9c0ed/32.png) [@fumster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fumster)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2012, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/67 "2012-10-10T23:22:30Z")
> [@johnpost](#): > > Welch has just quit writing for Fortune and Reuters after they both discounted his claims. Imagine a country where magazines are not allowed to question an opinion. ---
**Author:** ![Euphonious\_Polemic](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/euphonious_polemic/32/3002_2.png) [@Euphonious\_Polemic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Euphonious_Polemic)\ **Post date:** [October 10, 2012, 11:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/68 "2012-10-10T23:34:24Z")
Imagine a country where you are free to make wild and unsubstantiated claims about the leader of the country, and other people are free to point at you and mock you. ---
**Author:** ![gamerunknown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/6bbea6/32.png) [@gamerunknown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gamerunknown)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2012, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/69 "2012-10-11T15:55:22Z")
I have no doubt he’d be a Commissar in Soviet Russia. Concentrations of wealth and power attract a certain histrionic type (see also [Lord Carey](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2012/oct/09/gay-marriage-carey-nazi) claiming being called a bigot is the first step to concentration camps). ---
**Author:** ![YogSothoth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/y/8edcca/32.png) [@YogSothoth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/YogSothoth)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2012, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/70 "2012-10-11T16:51:43Z")
Jack Welch should go back to making grape juice ---
**Author:** ![Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/96bed5/32.png) [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patty_O_Furniture)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2012, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/71 "2012-10-11T17:11:04Z")
> [@LonghornDave](#): > > Jack Welch: I Was Right About That Strange Jobs Report > > The charge relates primarily to three numbers not passing his personal bullshit test. > > Combined with the statement that the BLS process is not very scientific. Meanwhile, [Both Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, and Doug Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, agreed that the numbers were not manipulated.](http://www.nationaljournal.com/sunday-shows/budget-wonks-the-books-were-not-cooked-20121007) ---
**Author:** ![pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a9a28c/32.png) [@pseudotriton\_ruber\_ruber](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pseudotriton_ruber_ruber)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2012, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936/72 "2012-10-11T18:31:34Z")
> [@Patty\_O\_Furniture](#): > > Meanwhile, [Both Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, and Doug Holtz-Eakin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, agreed that the numbers were not manipulated.](http://www.nationaljournal.com/sunday-shows/budget-wonks-the-books-were-not-cooked-20121007) That’s ok. Welch was only asking questions, anyway. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/jack-welch-pure-projection/636936.md?page=3)