It’s difficult to know what to say about the continued boom in employment in Rhode Island… at least the statistical appearance of it.  It’s like that scene in War Games when the artificial-intelligence computer has the military believing that nuclear war has actually started for one tense moment, until voices from locations that should be vaporized affirm that they’re still alive.  Only, in this case, it’s our unemployed neighbors saying, “We’re still here.”

Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) numbers, Rhode Island led the nation in the percentage increase of employed residents from April to May.  Somehow.  Unemployment is down to 8.2% (although it’d be over 11% if the protracted recession hadn’t push so many people out of the labor force).  But where’s the evidence?

As a matter of fact, even as official numbers for employment continue to shoot up like a missile, compared with last year, the growth in income withholdings from folks’ paychecks has actually slowed a bit.  Some of that may be that the Obama-Chafee economy is pushing more people into lower-paying jobs, but we’re talking more than 13,000 newly employed people since December.  If that amount of growth has had so little effect on income, it’s almost as much of a fraud as if the government were simply making up the numbers.  (The light pink line shows how closely the two trends held together last year.)

The basic chart tracing employment and the labor force (which is employed people plus those who say that they are actively looking for work) shows how hard it is to believe the numbers.  After five years of stagnation, we’ve suddenly made up all of the ground lost since January 2009.  For the most part, this year’s supposed recovery has been sharper than the crash.  Does it feel like that’s true, out there?

Of course, while expressing disbelief about these numbers, it’s important to note that it’s not a Rhode Island conspiracy.  Rhode Island still has the highest unemployment rate, and the only one above 8%.  The numbers for fourteen states showed a decrease in employment in May, month over month, but Massachusetts and Connecticut are not among them.  In that regard, we’re not gaining much ground in comparison with our neighbors.

That said, we are closing the gap with other states, such that Rhode Island and Michigan are not quite such outliers when it comes to their distance from peak employment.  (I should add the qualifier, again, that this is all if one believes the numbers.  If there’s something askew, as I strongly believe there is, then it could just be that it’s more askew in the Ocean State, which wouldn’t exactly be out of character.)

When it comes to the near-universal increase employment, compared with the end of the national jobs recession, however, Rhode Island is still among the lowest states.

And finally, the employment growth is all the more difficult to believe when it’s seen in context of growth in Rhode Island-based jobs, for which there is more direct, hard evidence.  Whereas the employment numbers are based on a survey.

As I’ve indicated, before, part of the explanation for the gap between the two datasets is that the darker area includes private contractors and the otherwise self-employed.  To the extent that’s a significant factor, the boom in the dark area might be expected to produce a blip in estimated taxes (which self-employed people are supposed to pay in lieu of employer withholding).  It’s true that estimated payments were up 22% this May, from estimates that government economists made for the month, but for the fiscal year, they’re down from estimates.

More tellingly, for the fiscal year so far, estimated payments are down about a half million dollars from where they were last year.  In fact, back in the autumn, before the supposed employment boom, estimated payments were up from the year before.  They’ve been down ever since January.

As I began by saying, there’s not much additional to say about numbers when one is as skeptical as I am.  For more detail on the above points, see last month’s version of this post.