November 2, 2012

Something to Look at While You Wait for the BLS Jobs Report

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Here’s something to ponder over while you wait for the BLS to release its final jobs report before the election. Gallup released its monthly unemployment survey on Thursday, and it showed a seasonally adjusted drop from 8.1 percent in September to 7.4 percent in October. The Gallup numbers are quite a bit more volatile than the official BLS numbers, as you can see in the chart below, but in general the two surveys move in similar directions. If that happens again on Friday, the BLS numbers will show a drop from 7.8 percent to…..I dunno….maybe 7.6 percent or so: a smaller decline than Gallup, but moving in the same direction.

Or maybe not. We’ll know Friday morning.

FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE: Nope. Unemployment ticked up to 7.9% according to the BLS report.

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We've never been very good at being conservative.

And usually, that serves us well in doing the ambitious, hard-hitting journalism that you turn to Mother Jones for. But it also means we can't afford to come up short when it comes to scratching together the funds it takes to keep our team firing on all cylinders, and the truth is, we finished our budgeting cycle on June 30 about $100,000 short of our online goal.

This is no time to come up short. It's time to fight like hell, as our namesake would tell us to do, for a democracy where minority rule cannot impose an extreme agenda, where facts matter, and where accountability has a chance at the polls and in the press. If you value our reporting and you can right now, please help us dig out of the $100,000 hole we're starting our new budgeting cycle in with an always-needed and always-appreciated donation today.

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