Statistics, more statistics and damn lies

One of my readers sent me the link to yesterday's column in the New York Post by John Crudele. (the link to the article is the title to this post) the point of Crudele's piece is that the census bureau is playing games iwth its employees in order to help with job creation numbers. We all remember the ballyhoo in recent weeks about how the economy is finally starting to create jobs again. Well now we hear that the Census bureau (which accounted for a big chunck of the new jobs) is hiring and then firing and then rehiring workers over and over again. Each new hire counts as a job created even if the person was just fired from a job that was already counted. In other words, Obama's census bureau is able to hype the numbers of new jobs created substantially just through manipulation.

So far, the evidence of manipulation is anecdotal. There is, however, too much anecdotal evidence for there to be nothing to the story. We just do not know how widespread the fraud is yet.

Thanks to Hotpanera for the article.