About

This chart presents monthly withheld-tax receipts. To account for the pronounced day-of-week and intra-month seasonality, each “month” is defined as a collection of complete weeks instead of every calendar day. The table’s layout is modeled on @wabuffo’s design shared on X.com.

The year-over-year growth rate of withheld-tax receipts serves as a leading indicator for lagged monthly releases like non-farm payrolls and the unemployment rate. While an algorithmically generated series explains about 25 percent of the historical variance in monthly unemployment changes, the author contends that the manually curated series should offer better predictive power.