Romney "cherry picking" jobs data, economist says

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is ?cherry picking? data on jobs to paint a too-negative picture of the U.S. economy after the Great Recession, a Washington economist said Thursday.

Romney?s plan for jobs and economic growth cites a loss of 800,000 jobs during the two years after the most recent recession, which ended in June 2009. That statistic is derived from the government?s survey of households, and focuses just on full-time employment.
Read Romney?s plan.

Meanwhile, a separate government survey of establishment payrolls shows that the U.S. economy gained 800,000 jobs over the two years after the recession. The household survey measures employed people, while the establishment survey measures nonfarm payroll jobs.

?The gold standard for employment trends is simply the payroll survey, and I literally can?t recall anybody using the full-time number from the household survey to compare cyclical job-trends anytime before, and I?ve seen a lot of such comparisons,? said Josh Bivens, director of research and policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank based in Washington.

Why is there a divergence between the household and establishment surveys?

?My sense is that very early in the recovery small businesses, including the self-employed, were having the most problems. The self-employed are counted in the survey of households but not in the survey of businesses,? said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody?s Analytics in West Chester, Pa.

When it comes to discrepancies between surveys, it?s not always clear which should be believed, said David Autor, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

?Clearly, Romney?s team chose whichever was most convenient for their story,? Autor said.
Romney?s campaign declined to comment.

?Ruth Mantell

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