NYS DOL Regional Business Expansions and Contractions Data

The NYS Department of Labor website has some great basic data - all the things you'd expect such as number of employed full time and part time workforce, unemployment rates, etc. All of this data is searchable by region. For Herkimer and Oneida Counties, you need to look at the Labor Statistics for the Mohawk Valley.

Buried within that page is some interesting data on business expansions and contractions. These are available by county. The Mohawk Valley contains six counties as conceived by the DOL - Fulton, Herkimer, Montgomery, Oneida, Otsego and Schoharie Counties. The data on the website provides information on firm-specific hiring and layoff announcements. Information in this report is derived from press releases, newspapers, business journals, newsletters, and other public sources. It does not include all expansions and contractions, only those for which public information has been obtained. An attempt is made to present only current information events that have recently occurred or will in the near future.

So while there is some limitation to what it is that you can see, it still provides a nice summary of what businesses have been (at least publicly) expanding or contracting.

Happy Birthday to Us ! Happy Birthday to Us !

I found this fascinating infographic on The Daily Viz about how common each day of the year is for birthdays in the United States. I say fascinating because while it is sort of interesting to look at your own birth date (mine happens to be January 1st) and see how unique or how common yours is, it is the patterns in the chart that intrigue me.

For example, clearly one of the most common months for births is September, and in particular mid-September to early October. Think about that... Nine months earlier is more or less Christmas and the New Year's holiday season.

Then there is the lack of births around July 4th. Lots of vacations, not just for pregnant moms but also for doctors around that holiday. The same thing can be said for the periods around Thanksgiving and Christmas.Obviously people's celebrations have impacts on the likelihood of scheduled, and unscheduled, births.

Then there is the one that most caught my eye. Instead of looking at months, look at the dates - horizontally across the graphic. The obvious date with the least births is the 13th of any month ! And imagine if it was a Friday the 13th at that !

So while an infographic can be just interesting to look at on the surface, they often tell even more about human activities and values than one might think at first glance !

Census Director's Assessment of Impact of Budget Cuts

Here's is a link to the Director of the US Census Bureau's blog where he discusses the impact of recent passed cuts by the House of Representatives to the census budget and American Communities Survey.

In his words...

• The Appropriations Bill eliminates the Economic Census, which measures the health of our economy. It terminates the American Community Survey, which produces the social and demographic information that monitors the impact of economic trends on communities throughout the country. It halts crucial development of ways to save money on the next decennial census. In the last three years the Census Bureau has reacted to budget and technological challenges by mounting aggressive operational efficiency programs to make these key statistical cornerstones of the country more cost efficient. Eliminating them halts all the progress to build 21st century statistical tools through those innovations. This bill thus devastates the nation’s statistical information about the status of the economy and the larger society.

The loss of these important data sources could be devastating to local agencies and governments as they compete for fewer and fewer federal resources.

American Communities Survey Under Attack

The U.S. House of Representatives voted last week (232 - 190) to eliminate all funding for the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS), which was a survey created to replace the traditional census long form starting with the 2010 Census.  The vote essentially was along party lines, with all but 11 Republicans voting in favor and all but four (4) Democrats voting against.  The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL).

In addition, right before the House considered the Webster amendment, it approved, by voice vote, an amendment sponsored by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) to make response to the ACS voluntary, by prohibiting both the Census Bureau and the Justice Department from using funds to enforce penalties in the  Census Act that make survey response mandatory.

While this move in the House of Representatives is but a first step to stripping the ACS from the Census Bureau, it would still have to be approved (and assumedly brought back to committee) by the Senate and then ultimately approved and signed by the President. These seem less likely to occur but are not outside of the realm of possibilities.

The American Community Survey, which collects data on some 3 million households each year, is the largest survey next to the decennial census. The ACS—which has a long bipartisan history, including its funding in the mid-1990s and full implementation in 2005—provides data that help determine how more than $400 billion in federal and state funds are spent annually. Businesses also rely heavily on it to do such things as decide where to build new stores, hire new employees, and get valuable insights on consumer spending habits. 

The following two articles provide a variety of insight into last week's Congressional action. The first is from Business Week  and the other was posted by the Washington Times. Regardless of one's political perspective, one of the great dangers in the elimination of nationally collected data on everything from education, to poverty to miles driven to work is that agencies that rely on such data for grant applications will now have to figure out how to get it on their own. Much of the data can ONLY be found in the ACS.

Transitioning Into Retirement: Metlife Study Finds More “Boomers” Retiring at 65

Despite the popular belief that Baby Boomers will continue to work well past the traditional retirement age of 65, those born in 1946 are retiring in droves, according to Transitioning into Retirement: The MetLife Study of Baby Boomers at 65. This study is a follow–up to the 2008 MetLife Mature Market Institute study, Boomer Bookends: Insights into the Oldest and Youngest Boomers (released in 2009), which looked at the same segment of Boomers at age 62 and includes 450 of the same interview subjects from the original study. 

The study reports that 59% of the first Boomers to turn 65 are at least partially retired – 45% are completely retired and 14% are retired, but working part-time. Of those still working, 37% say they’ll retire in the next year and on average plan to do so by the time they’re 68. Half (51%) of those who are retired say they retired earlier than they had expected. Of those who retired early, four-in-ten say they did so for health reasons. The majority (85%) of respondents consider themselves healthy, and almost all (96%) retirees say they like retirement at least somewhat. Seven-in-ten (70%) like it a lot.

 In Herkimer and Oneida Counties, more than half of the residents age 65 or older are presently receiving some form of retirement income. In Herkimer County 53% of all people age 65 and over receive at least some retirement income; in Oneida County it is nearly 60% of the population age 65 and over. But not all Baby Boomers age 65 and over are retired. As many as one out of every seven residents (14%) age 65+ are still a part of the work force and employed. 

Click here to read the Metlife report on Baby Boomers and Retirement.