The following article from the The Wall Street Journal suggest that  the unemployment rate would have been much lower without government cuts.

Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1%

By Justin Lahart

One reason the unemployment rate may have remained persistently high: The sharp cuts in state and local government spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the layoffs those cuts wrought.

The Labor Department’s establishment survey of employers — the jobs count that it bases its payroll figures on — shows that the government has been steadily shedding workers since the crisis struck, with 586,000 fewer jobs than in December 2008. Friday’s employment report showed the cuts continued in April, with 15,000 government jobs lost.

But the survey of households that the unemployment rate is based on suggests the government job cuts have been much, much worse.

In April the household survey showed that that there were 442,000 fewer people working in government than in March. The household survey has a much smaller sample size than the establishment survey, and so is prone to volatility, but the magnitude of the drop is striking: It marks the largest decline on both an absolute and a percentage basis on record going back to 1948. Moreover, the household survey has consistently showed bigger drops in government employment than the establishment survey has.

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn’t been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.

Ceteris is rarely paribus, of course: If there were more government jobs now, for example, it’s likely that not as many people would have left the labor force, and so the actual unemployment rate would be north of 7.1%.

More important, even after making an adjustment for the volatility of the household survey, the starkly different message that it is offering up on the scope of job government losses is curious.

In the three months ended April, it shows that there were an average 20.3 million people engaged in government work, 1.2 million fewer than the average for the three months ended December 2008. That is more than double the job losses registered by the establishment survey.

One explanation is that the household survey is picking up government job losses that the establishment survey hasn’t — it can, generally speaking, be better at picking up shifts in the makeup of the job market.

Another explanation is that the household survey might be picking up jobs lost by people who worked at private companies that were reliant on government spending. A school bus driver, say, who was polled by the Labor Department for the household survey might say that he works for the government when he actually works for a bus company that’s contracted by the local school district. If the school district curtails spending and he loses his job, that would be counted as a government job loss in the household survey, even though it really isn’t.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/05/08/unemployment-rate-without-government-cuts-7-1/

Who Occupies? A Pollster Surveys the Protester

By Aaron Rutkoff

To judge by its most famous slogan, Occupy Wall Street sees itself as a movement made up of those in the bottom 99% of the income distribution. But what are the actual demographics of the committed protesters inside New York’s Zuccotti Park, the movement’s birthplace and most visible manifestation?

Douglas Schoen, a veteran Democratic Party pollster who has also worked for Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sent a researcher from his polling firm down to Zuccotti Park last week to conduct what appears to be the very first professional survey of the protesters in New York. The face-to-face interviews with 198 people informed an essay by Schoen in The Journal’s opinion pages.

Putting aside Schoen’s analysis — the subhead on his piece pegs the protesters as “leftists out of step with most American voters,” if you’re curious — let’s focus instead on the raw data, which he was kind enough to publish on his personal website. The findings are quite surprising.

The protesters as a group are young, but Zuccotti Park is not nearly the youth-only movement depicted in the media. While 49% of protesters are under 30, more than 28% are 40 or older. Only one-third of the crowd considers themselves Democrats — nearly the same portion who say they don’t identify with any party. (Zero respondents labeled themselves Republican.)

Schoen finds reason to be skeptical of the protesters’ professed motivation: the inequities of the U.S. economic system. “The vast majority of demonstrators are actually employed, and the proportion of protesters unemployed (15%) is within single digits of the national unemployment rate (9.1%),” he writes in his essay. But those numbers might not be the best way to assess the economic health of the protest group.

Schoen’s survey found that, in addition to the 15% of protesters who are jobless, another 18% consider themselves “part-time employed/underemployed” — for a combined total of 33% who are struggling in the labor market. That percentage is double the U.S. Labor Department’s broader measure of unemployment, which accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs. As of September, this so-called “U-6″ measure rose to 16.5%, the highest rate this year.

The pollster has a curious reading of his data when describing Occupy Wall Street’s previous support for President Barack Obama. “An overwhelming majority of demonstrators supported Barack Obama in 2008,” Schoen writes.

But according to the survey data, just 56% of protesters voted in 2008, and of those 74% voted for Obama. Crunching the numbers, it would appear that only 42% of the Zuccotti Park crowd has ever cast a presidential ballot for Obama.

The president looks likely to improve his standing with the protesters in 2012. The survey found 48% would vote for his re-election, even though a slim 51% majority of the protesters disapprove of his job performance.

Finally, the poll sheds some light on the protesters’ underlying policy agenda. The polling falls short of consensus, but some clear themes emerge.

When asked whether the U.S. should increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans, more than three-fourths of the protesters said yes. More taxes on everyone? A smaller majority, 58%, said no.

And then there’s this interesting open-ended question from the poll: What would you like to see the Occupy Wall Street movement achieve? Here are the responses (emphasis added):

• 35% Influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP
• 4% Radical redistribution of wealth
• 5% Overhaul of tax system: replace income tax with flat tax
• 7% Direct Democracy
• 9% Engage & mobilize Progressives
• 9% Promote a national conversation
• 11% Break the two-party duopoly
• 4% Dissolution of our representative democracy/capitalist system
• 4% Single payer health care
• 4% Pull out of Afghanistan immediately
• 8% Not sure

The two answers in bold seem sufficiently similar as to constitute a single answer — energizing populism on the left —  with 44% support.

So the survey tells us that the Zuccotti Park protesters are underemployed at twice the national rate, lukewarm to warm on Obama and broadly in favor of taxing the wealthy and encouraging a Tea Party-style populism on the left.

http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2011/10/19/who-is-occupying-wall-street-a-pollster-surveys-protester/

Earlier this week a Times article looked at social scientists who are trying tostudy Occupy Wall Street in real time. But a group of archivists are also hitting the streets, and the Internet, in an effort to preserve the movement’s traces for scholars of the future.

Within weeks of the occupation of Zuccotti Park last fall archivists from the New-York Historical Society and other institutions were out scooping up posters, flyers, pamphlets, signs and other ephemera. “For us, it’s an event in New York City,” said Jean Ashton, the society’s executive vice president and director of its library, which has so far amassed several hundred Occupy-related artifacts. “We want to make sure that people understand what happened here.”

Other archivists are collecting some of the explosion of digital materials by and about Occupy. New York University’s Tamiment Library has been recording the meetings of the movement’s Think Tank group and archiving the Web page of the New York group’s general assembly. The Internet Archive, a nonprofit Web site, and the Occupy Archive, a project at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media, has been collecting material from Occupy sites beyond New York.

So far OccupyArchive has some 3,200 items relating to hundreds of occupations around the country, mostly gathered by volunteers who have scoured the Web for scans of meeting minutes, posters, Flicker photos and other material. “Many local occupations were quite good about keeping minute notes, agendas and that kind of thing,” Sharon Leon, the Rosenzweig’s director of public programs, said. “That will eventually be a rich archive for historians doing work on social movements and post-recession reaction on the left.”

But despite the profusion of material online some archivists say that the historical record of the future may have some gaping holes. While Twitter, Facebook and other social media have been crucial to the movement, the terms of use of most social media sites prevent anyone from publishing material harvested from them. “Look back at the Arab Spring,” said Howard Besser, an archivist at N.Y.U. and founder of Activist Archivists, a group created last fall to coordinate the collection of digital media relating to Occupy. “We actually have precious little that scholars can use to look at how things spread.”

Archiving efforts have also met some initial skepticism from the Occupy movement itself, though Mr. Besser said most people had overcome their wariness about collaborating with traditional institutions. “There are lots of people who don’t get the idea of archiving, but that’s true everywhere,” he said. “Most people, when it’s explained, are very quick to understand.”

Activist Archivists has worked with Occupy Wall Street’s archives working group to create a “Why Archive” postcard to distribute at future demonstrations. (The first of five bullet points: “Accountability. Archives collect evidence that can hold those in power accountable.”) The group has also worked to counter fears that material gathered by archivists could end up being used in legal actions against protesters. Mr. Besser said they were looking into training activists to use ObscuraCam, a technology developed by human rights groups that automatically obscures faces in photographs and videos.

“The archivist part of us says we want to grab everything of enduring value and keep it,” Mr. Besser said. “But the activist part says that we may not want to save certain things, or may not want the police to have access to certain things.”

In the meantime Occupy is also storing its own archive of hundreds of signs, posters, flyers and one-of-a-kind objects recovered after the eviction from Zuccotti Park, like banners for the camp’s kitchen and other facilities made out of orange plastic netting used by the police.

Anna Perricci, a member of the archives working group who is coordinating digital preservation efforts, said that it was important for Occupy to have an active part in curating its own history.

“There are a lot of other people recording the movement and telling its story,” she said. “But I also want to empower occupiers to help preserve what is being made while their story is unfolding.”

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/occupy-wall-street-from-the-streets-to-the-archives/

By COLIN MOYNIHAN