From Special Report with Bret Baier |Friday, October 5, 2012
On the September jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Well, the numbers are rather tricky because when you get a drop in the rate and then you get this anemic job — anemic increase in the number of new jobs, they contradict each other. And the reason that you can [see] these contradictions is because each of them comes from a completely different survey. The anemic rise in new jobs comes from the survey of employers, and it’s a huge and vast survey where one out of every three employers is questioned, whereas the unemployment rate comes from the survey of households, where it’s only six-tenths of one [10th] of one percent of all households that are being surveyed. So, you’ve got a very small sample.
It doesn’t mean that one is right and the other is wrong, but it means that the second one, where you have this very small [sample], you could have huge fluctuations.
The answer is we don’t know which [number] is right except for one thing, Austan Goolsbee, who was the president’s own economist, said the only number in the end that you can rely on is the growth of GDP in the economy and that’s 1.3 percent, a rate at which everybody agrees you can only get unemployment stagnant or rising. So at this rate of growth which is less this year than last year, less last year than the year before, we are headed for higher unemployment despite the fluctuations that we saw today.
On the possibility of the one remaining — November — jobs report impacting the election and the reliability of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
It [the October report] helps the president nonetheless because there will be so many people who go out and vote in October before the last numbers will come out.
But let me just say, if anything, it’s a sampling error and could ended up being corrected over time, in the next month or two. But I don’t believe, as some on the right have suggested, it’s a conspiracy. I think people ought to stay away from any conspiracies, particularly here, because the BLS is a fairly reliable and insulated agency.
On the condemnations by Senators Graham and McCain of the Obama administration’s decision to promise defense contractors to pay for their legal fees if they ignore the WARN Act and do not tell their employees about impending mass layoffs due to sequestration:
Lindsey [Graham] is exactly right. It’s another example of the administration’s lawlessness. For example, in the DREAM act, which is telling the ICE, the immigration department, not to enforce a large area of immigration law — [in accordance with] an amendment that was rejected explicitly by the Congress. They’re doing it again here.
And this is lawlessness squared. They’re saying not only should you break the law [regarding notification of employees], but if you’re sued we’re going to use the money that we get in taxes as a way to protect you in the lawsuit. It is, you know, the executive’s obligation is to execute the laws, and they’re doing exactly the opposite — with obvious impunity.
On advice to Governor Romney for his upcoming foreign policy speech at the Virginia Military Institute on Monday:
Connect the dots. There’s been an explosion of anti- Americanism in half the world and the administration pretends it’s about a video. You have to make the case that this is the reaction to the new radical policy Obama announced in Cairo of accommodation and appeasement with the Muslim world, and the fruits are not just that we aren’t loved… but we are not respected — in fact, despised — in large areas of the world.
On the most significant moment in the election so far:
It is the debate — it’s the first 62 years in which one guy won decisively without a moment, either a gaffe or a zinger. And that makes it unique.