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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

They survey businesses because the Social Security database has too much lag and does not contain enough detail.

The lag is because it is based on employer submissions that are quarterly or annual.

Does that pass the basic common sense smell test? Everyone can see on their paycheck the amount, that is paid 30 days after any work day in the worst case. These payments are sent to a single federal bank account, and data-wise are combined with Social Security ID, sending bank id, date. It’s a bank, there’s a database. We are talking at most about 200mm records, a raspberry pi can process that query in minutes. If we can’t query this easily it’s by design. Or we could do some backflips and somersaults to try to come up with a reason for why the bureaucracy has to be more complicated.

The payments are deposited monthly or semiweekly (for employers with large payroll) but that's a lump sum. If you are looking at that from the government side all you can tell is whether total payroll has gone up or down. That won't tell if any change is due to a change in number of employees or a change in pay rates or some combination of that.

It isn't until the employer files their quarterly Form 941 that you'd see employment numbers. Form 941 includes the number of employees and total wages and withholding.

It isn't until the annual W-2 filings that you would see a breakdown that includes number of employees and the individual pay.

Ah okay, this is why then. So all my other comments complaining about the lack of timeliness have this simple explanation. TIL

Not all 'normal income' is from a "job" as we think of it and assuming that does not even come close to passing any informed person's smell test.

Parsing tax or SS payments for what a "job" is would be a logistical nightmare, because that's not what the system is designed for (unlike the BLS's system, which is designed to count jobs).

When ppl want job numbers they want a reliable proxy for the state of the economy. Fixing it on changes to payroll-based social security payments would be far better than what we have now, if timely.

Sure, that's personal income and can be found here:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PINCOME

I only see a stat that reports the same number for full employment vs one person who fired them all and took their incomes. Is there a way to disaggregate to get some proxy for employment like we are talking about?

Yes, the BLS employment survey.

And yet, SS contributions are done every pay period.

Who has that data then? Treasury?

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