More "unexpected" news

How often does bad news have to be unexpected before it becomes expected? From Bloomberg:

U.S. Hiring Disappoints, Jobless Rate Falls to 9.7%

Yep. After months of bad unemployment news, and more and more spending that created no jobs... its disappointing that the unemployment rate has not gone down.
But here is the kicker:

Private payrolls rose by 41,000, Labor Department figures showed today, trailing the 180,000 gain forecast by economists. Including government workers, employment rose by 431,000, boosted by a jump in hiring of temporary census workers. The jobless rate fell to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent.

So the vast majority of the jobs created were in the Census... which means that the jobless rate is going to skyrocket this fall.

If the Huffpost didn't leave out facts, they wouldn't print anything

So an acquaintance linked me to this Huffington Post article:

"If the economy produces jobs over the next eight months at the same pace as it did over the past four months, the nation will have created more jobs in 2010 alone than it did over the entire eight years of George W. Bush's presidency."

Something sounded strange about that... so I followed the link to the National Journal, where the article came from:

More jobs might be created this year than during George W. Bush's presidency.

It sounded suspicious to me. So I read the article looking for the magic words "census jobs". The article does not mention them.
That made me curious as to what the job report (listed in the article above) actually said:

Job gains occurred in manufacturing, professional and business services, health care, and leisure and hospitality. Federal government employment also rose, reflecting continued hiring
of temporary workers for Census 2010.

Hmmm. Sounds like the Census is creating a lot of that job surge. Just as I thought.
But I wasn't satisfied with that. Because my friend's friends tried to suggest that Census workers weren't included in the job numbers.
The following is from a PDF that the commerce department sent out in February of 2010:

According to Census Bureau operational plans, the number of hires for temporary 2010 Census jobs is estimated to be about 800,000 during April and May of this year. For several techincal reasons, including the very short term tenure of these jobs, the number of 2010 Census hires will not be fully reflected in either the monthly levels or changes in non-farm employment
reported by the BLS. Based on the experience in the 2000 census, the BLS figures may show the number of temporary census jobs peaking at a level closer to 635,000 in May.

Read that paragraph again. It suggest that a whole lot of jobs might be temporarily created in May. And then the level of jobs will go down again.
Now I just happened to find out recently that the Census kind of, you know, over-hired this year. Which means that they are not only done hiring, but they are trying to figure out what to do with all of their staff.
Which means that in the next two months, we might see another surge of unemployed folks out there. I presume then that the Huffington Post will notice the Census jobs.