Tuesday, April 06, 2004

Job Count

With the release of the new job-creation estimates, I keep hearing soundbites on the radio news about how Kerry and his people are claiming that not one of those jobs is in manufacturing. I'd really like to understand how they figure that they can know that. Since I'm pretty sure they don't get these statistics from some federal jobs database, where everyone who created a job is required to report it, how can anyone know with any certainty where or in what industry these jobs were created? Surely in this humungous country there was at least ONE manufacturing job, out of some 300-thousand-odd jobs created.

Any readers who can inform me on this one (M?) are welcome to e-mail me privately or post to the comments. Thanks.

UPDATE: I found this thanks to Instapundit, where it says that "Manufacturing payrolls were unchanged". As far as I know "unchanged" means there were as many jobs lost as created, right? And these statistics include only existing payrolls, not newly created payrolls, right? Or am I completely clueless?