Iowa Speaks …

Sanders by a nose in the Democrat Caucus. Hillary’s miseries continue.
Trump by a bit in the Republican caucus. This is where he starts putting space between him and the other Republican candidates.

WHAT FITS NEWS WON’T REPORT: Part I
The South Carolina Department of Employment and Workforce (SCDEW) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released news on South Carolina’s December 2015 employment situation on January 26, 2016. The extraordinary nature of this month’s data deserves detailed analysis that hasn’t been done in the government releases or in the media. All of this data was collected by the Census Bureau from two monthly nationwide surveys. These surveys are commonly called the Household survey and the Institutional survey.

First, I will start with the major details of the SCDEW news release available on the right sidebar at http://www.sces.org.

The December unemployment rate remained unchanged from November at 5.5 percent. However, the number of people working in South Carolina grew by 10,111 people, pushing South Carolina’s employment level to 2,147,642, a historic high.

The number of people unemployed was virtually unchanged from November to December at 124,022 while the labor force increased by 10,300 to 2,271,664 people.

Over the past year, employment gains totaled 78,452, an all-time, year-over-year record for the state. Since December 2014, the number of unemployed people has decreased by 23,040, and the labor force has grown by nearly 55,412 people.

Nationally, the unemployment rate held steady at 5 percent in December.

Now what the SCDEW, MSM and Fits won’t Print
All of the above information comes from the Household survey. To better understand the above data, the labor force increased by 1,300. This equals the increase in employment of 10,111 plus an increase in the number of unemployed job seekers of 189. While an increase in the unemployed is normally not good, in this case indicates that formerly discouraged workers are reentering the work force. This may mean that there is still room for more job growth while there may not yet be pressure to increase wages.

All of the above data can calculated from data that can be downloaded from an .xlsx file link above the table at http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LASST450000000000006?data_tool=XGtable.
The data is available in one file covering each month since January 1976.

By opening the above download in an Excel spreadsheet, I was able compute more detailed information about South Carolina’s employment situation that has not been reported elsewhere. The 10,111 jobs gained in December is the third highest month ever. The other two record months also occurred in the last twelve months. In fact, the top seven months ever recorded for job gains in South Carolina were in the last twelve months. January 2015, the current record holder and the first of these record breaking months at 10,610 jobs broke the existing record lasting since October 2006 by 3,888 jobs and the second highest from July 1983 by 3,928 jobs.

The 78,452 year-over-year job gains, as reported by SCDEW above, was the second consecutive record breaking month. These two months broke the previous record that was held since May 1984 of 70,735 jobs. The May 1984 record was more impressive considering South Carolina’s much smaller population at the time. I have calculated the yearly percent job growth rate since 1977. At 3.79%, December’s year-over-year job growth rate is SC’s highest since November 1984.