A few issues arose with regard to last Friday's jobs number; in particular, the effect of government jobs in the form of Census and teaching jobs, whether seasonal adjustments are unhelpful at this time; and whether the birth/death model used by the BLS has undercounted job losses (due to increased non-reporting by closed businesses). I'm going to examine this in two posts. Wednesday (hopefully!), I'll go into detail as to what withholding taxes can tell us about the employment numbers. Now I want to compare the BLS payrolls data with the Census's household survey.
Let's