In response to The unemployment mirage:
Congressman Darrell Issa is looking into the NY Posts’ shocking allegations that the Census Bureau instructed employees to fabricate data for the nation’s unemployment reports.
The House Oversight and Reform Committee is demanding answers from the director of the Census Bureau about data used for a jobs report that showed a suspiciously large drop in unemployment just a month from Election Day 2012.
Committee ChairmanIssa, R-Calif., wrote Tuesday to Census Bureau Director John Thompson calling the allegations in the New York Post “shocking.” Issa requested information about Julius Buckmon, the employee the Post said fabricated data after being unable to reach the people who had the information he needed.
The jobs report, released in October 2012 just ahead of Election Day, showed that the unemployment rate had dropped under Obama from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent even though the economy had added only 114,000 jobs.
Issa wants all of Buckmon’s emails, his list of supervisors and any material related to a government investigation of Buckmon’s actions, which according to the Post took place in 2010 and escalated in the months leading up to the election. Issa gave the bureau until Dec. 3 to produce the information.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau has asked its inspector general to look into report, and released a statement; “We have no reason to believe that there was a systematic manipulation of the data described in media reports. We carefully cross check and verify the work of our staff to ensure the data’s validity.”
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney swatted away Jonathan Karl’s question about the bombshell report, saying that the “story is obviously misleading” and “I think a lot of people shed a lot of credibility engaging in conspiracy theories last fall about, you know, rigged jobs numbers.”
Jay Carney is certainly one to know something about “shedding credibility.”
Carney, without naming names, was deriding business oriented experts like former GE CEO Jack Welch and Rick Santelli, who expressed extreme doubt, last year, that the numbers showing a dip in unemployment from 8.1 to 7.8 percent, were valid. Now, according to the highly credible Jay Carney, they’re “job truthers.”
Yeah, I’m glad Issa’s looking into this.
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