CORRECTION

The central premise and complaint of this post is factually incorrect.  According to an October 30 release from the BLS:

Persons on temporary layoff need not be looking for work to be classified as unemployed. (Persons not on temporary layoff need to have actively looked for work in the 4 weeks prior to the survey in order to be classified as unemployed.)

I’d thought people on temporary layoff were counted in one of the more-expansive, alternate measures of unemployment; that was incorrect, and inasmuch as the above clarification was published before my post, I could have discovered my error if I’d looked more carefully.

I apologize to readers and to Christopher Rugaber and thank commenter Joe Smith for bringing my attention to my mistake.

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We may be about to see a big spike in the unemployment numbers, warns AP writer Christopher Rugaber, but don’t go thinking there’s anything wrong with the Obama economy.  No, sir, it’s a statistical quirk and the fault of the so-called Republican shutdown… you know, when the Republicans had a score-plus of votes to keep the government open while trying to negotiate with Democrats to budge even a little to soften what predictably proved to be a disastrous ObamaCare implementation.

Unfortunately, the reasoning that Rugaber conveys contains a glaring contradiction:

One [measure of unemployment] is a household survey. Government workers ask adults in a household whether they have a job. Those who don’t but are looking for one are counted as unemployed. That’s how the unemployment rate is calculated. …

Suppose you’re a federal worker who was furloughed by the shutdown. The payroll survey would consider you employed.

Note that people are only counted as “unemployed” if they say that they are not working and have looked for work in the past month.

“Furloughed” means an unexpected period of time off, and the article goes on to explain that government workers furloughed for the shutdown were promised back pay (a promise made pretty quickly in the shutdown).  So, for this analysis to be accurate, government workers who were essentially given some unexpected paid time off would have had to tell the employment-survey interviewers that they were actively looking for work.  That doesn’t sound very likely.

Of course, this sort of spin is now par for the course on the media’s Obama-era golf course.