By Douglas Holtz-Eakin – First, let’s dismiss the notion that the integrity of the data-collection process was undermined. Anyone at all familiar with the production of federal economic statistics – at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Federal Reserve, or elsewhere – can appreciate the firewalls that exist between the professional collection, analysis and publication of economic data and the remainder of the agencies’ missions – especially their political appointees. It is unfathomable that these would be breached.
It is even more unfathomable that they would be breached without the career civil servants getting on the telephone to, say, Reuters and reporting the political manipulation within a nanosecond of it occurring.
The fact is that the household survey has only 55,000 to 60,000 households in the sample. To make it representative, it has to cover gender, age, race and education level. That means that there are likely relatively few people in any particular “cell”. more> http://tinyurl.com/9b7ppv9
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