numerical misinformation

President Barack Hussein Obama lies, just like all politicians before him. The reality of this simple fact is pretty much undisputable, but sometimes it amazes me how bald-faced those lies really are:

“What you’ve seen is that the pace of job loss has slowed,” the president said. “The economy is going to turn around, but as you know, jobs are a lagging indicator and we’ve got to produce 150,000 jobs every month just to keep pace, just to flatten this out.”

Really? The “pace of job loss” has actually decreased? Well, you might want to tell that to the nice folks at the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, because their numbers say something else entirely:

(This graph is a result of limiting the dataset to just the past 18 months – the above hyperlink provides information for everything back to 1999.)
Now, it has been a while since I had to deal with these kinds of mathematics, but if my grade-school education is still accurately retained somewhere, the slope of a line is equivalent to the rate of change for the data represented by the graph. Furthermore, “rate” is synonymous to “pace”, at least in this particular context, so let us take a look at the raw numbers of the unemployment rate from June of last year until May of this year:

JUN08: 5.6
JUL08: 5.8
AUG08: 6.2
SEP08: 6.2
OCT08: 6.6
NOV08: 6.8
DEC08: 7.2
JAN09: 7.6
FEB09: 8.1
MAR09: 8.5
APR09: 8.9
MAY09: 9.4

Ok, now it is time to take a look at the rate of changes between the months. Given that the “run” in all cases will be one (only one month passes), then the rate of change from month to month basically becomes the difference between months:

JUN08 to JUL08: 0.2
JUL08 to AUG08: 0.4
AUG08 to SEP08: 0.0
SEP08 to OCT08: 0.4
OCT08 to NOV08: 0.2
NOV08 to DEC08: 0.4
DEC08 to JAN09: 0.4
JAN09 to FEB09: 0.5
FEB09 to MAR09: 0.4
MAR09 to APR09: 0.4
APR09 to MAY09: 0.5

Or, graphically, you can see the rate of change here:

From June of last year, to May of this year, the average month-to-month unemployment rate of change has been +0.3455, more-or-less.
Funny, I could swear that 0.5 was greater than both 0.4 and 0.3455.
Even if you take the rate of change as a percentage increase, the numbers come out rather similar:

JUN08 to JUL08: 3.57%
JUL08 to AUG08: 6.90%
AUG08 to SEP08: 0.0%
SEP08 to OCT08: 6.45%
OCT08 to NOV08: 3.03%
NOV08 to DEC08: 5.88%
DEC08 to JAN09: 5.56%
JAN09 to FEB09: 6.58%
FEB09 to MAR09: 4.94%
MAR09 to APR09: 4.71%
APR09 to MAY09: 5.62%

From June of last year, to May of this year, the average month-to-month unemployment rate of change has been a 4.84% increase, more-or-less.
Funny, I could swear that 5.62% was greater than both 4.71% and 4.84%.
[2213 Update] After talking with Better Half (you know, the mathematician in the family), it would appear as though I might be one derivative off. Our Glorious President was referring to the “rate of job loss”, not the rate of change in the unemployment rate – this is political weasel-wording, granted, but we think we have figured out what he means. As “job loss” is effectively the rate of change in the unemployment rate, I need to thus find the slope (and thus the rate of change) of the “job loss” chart. Thankfully, those particular numbers are just the differences between the second lists’s numbers:

JUL08 to AUG08: 0.2
AUG08 to SEP08: -0.4
SEP08 to OCT08: 0.4
OCT08 to NOV08: -0.2
NOV08 to DEC08: 0.2
DEC08 to JAN09: 0.0
JAN09 to FEB09: 0.1
FEB09 to MAR09: -0.1
MAR09 to APR09: 0.0
APR09 to MAY09: 0.1

From July of last year, to May of this year, the average month-to-month job loss rate of change has been +0.03, more-or-less.
Funny, I could swear that 0.1 was greater than both 0.0 and 0.03.
Of course, now the question becomes, “What range was our Glorious President referring to?” If he was comparing the last three months we have data on (with an average rate of job loss of 0.0) to the three months before that (with an average rate of 0.1), then he would be correct…. but, that is not what he said, is it? Silly me, taking people’s words at face value… [/Update]
So could someone please point out where the “pace of job loss has slowed”? Sure, if the Obamabots want to play the numbers game, the rate did slow from February to March, and if they want to play the numbers game even farther and fiddle with percentages, the rate slowed again from March to April. But then the rate went and increased itself by 25% between April and May.
How is a 25% increase indicative of something “slowing”? If I start driving 25% faster, am I “slowing” down?
[2213 Update] Likewise, if the Obamalamadingdongs want to talk about the rate of the rate of change, it still increased between April and May, and technically it even increased between March and April too – going from negative to zero is an increase, after all. [/Update]
Now, it could be that the DoL BoLS has not gotten the Obamamessiah Memo Unicorn today, and has not adjusted their numbers accordingly… and it could be that our Glorious President is operating off tentative June numbers that, for some reason, have not been released to the public yet. But me… I smell the distinct odor of a load of gos-se being dumped on the American taxpayer.
Of course, given all the data I just copy-pasted for you, this is a sucker’s bet:

His outlook mirrors the forecasts of private economists who predict a jobless rate of 10 percent — a level unseen since 1983 — by the final three months of the year.

Uh, duh. Given the 12-month average month-to-month change of 0.3455, June should see an unemployment rate of approximately 9.75, and July should score in at approximately 10.1. Now, that forecast is assuming that this situation does not level off in the next two months (and, honestly, it would be bloody wonderful if it did level off), but it is also assuming that things do not spiral even farther out of control.
So who wants to take those odds?
[2213 Update] One final thought – “unemployment numbers” may not necessarily be equivalent to “jobs lost” numbers. Not all individuals who lost their jobs will file for unemployment, and not all people who come off unemployment do so because they got a job. Of course, both of those potential unaccounted for variables only make our Glorious President’s lie worse… [/Update]