Saturday, July 24, 2010

I started to new area under the Blog called mistakes

Just a quick, public place to complain about stupid mistakes I made as I write for the Blog.

This time I was trying to compare employment for government: Federal, State and Local. I wanted to check out the size of the government at the different levels.

Conservatives always complain about the government size but they usually mean the federal government, rarely the state and never the local government. But the local government is 4 times as large. Cops, teachers and firemen plus good pensions and benefits.

Anyway, I picked the wrong data set. A set which was NOT seasonally adjusted and here is my chart. See that annoying saw-tooth pattern in data. That is seasonality, which just confuses the whole picture. Oops.

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