Thursday, June 23, 2016

So much for the unemployment figures


I've complained many times in these pages about how unemployment statistics are deliberately falsified by the bureaucrats who generate them.  Now comes this.

... a close reading of the data suggests that economic growth is negligible, and the real unemployment rate is about 23%.

That is the Shadow Government Statistics alternative unemployment rate for May 2016. Quite a contrast with the headline “official” unemployment rate of 4.7%.

But upon inspection, you can see that the alarming 23% ShadowStats unemployment rate is merely unemployment calculated as it was until the Kennedy administration, when out-of-work Americans who had suspended an active search for jobs — primarily because none could be found — were relabeled “discouraged workers” and dropped from the tally of the unemployed.

The Clinton administration widened the memory hole further.

In 1994, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) redefined the workforce to exclude all but the small percentage of the discouraged who had been seeking work for less than a year. The longer-term discouraged — some 4 million U.S. adults — disappeared into a statistical black hole.

Clinton also reduced the sample-sized employed in the household survey that determines the unemployment rate — excluding a disproportionate share of inner-city households who were less likely to have jobs.

Over the years, American politicians have used statistical sleight of hand to protect themselves from the angry mobs of voters in a way that the witch doctors and high priests of the past could only envy.

In the old days, when the rains didn’t come and the crops failed, the high priests could not fool anyone by merely issuing a proclamation thanking the gods for bumper crops.

Today, Obama proclaims a “vigorous recovery” and The New York Times pretends to believe it.

. . .

Notwithstanding the fact that the BLS has been adding an average of 200,000 fake jobs to the monthly payroll report in recent years (as confirmed by the March 2015 benchmark downside revisions that subtracted 206,000 jobs), the actual employment picture has become so weak that they have brazenly added additional monthly upside biases.

That’s why Donald Trump says: “Only ‘dummies’ believe Fed’s unemployment figure”.

Donald Trump has tried to advance the national conversation by underscoring a point that should be evident to any thinking person. Namely, that the “recovery” the establishment is so keen to have you embrace is a fraud.

If elected president, Trump promises to draw back the veil of statistical flummery that disguises reality for credulous people. Trump is the first candidate in my memory to say he “will investigate the veracity of U.S. economic statistics produced by Washington — including ‘the way they are reported.’”

No wonder the establishment hates him.

As George Orwell, the author of 1984, put it: “The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”

There's much more at the link.  It's well worth your while to read it in full.  It's important.

We're being consistently, systematically lied to by the 'establishment'.  They've done so for so long that we've grown accustomed to it, and we tend to let the lies slide.  It's my hope that the support being shown for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is, at least, an indication that more and more Americans are seeing the lies for what they are, and getting fed up with them.  If they are . . . there may be hope for the Republic yet.

Peter

5 comments:

naleta said...

"If elected president, Trump promises to draw back the veil of statistical flummery that disguises reality for credulous people. Trump is the first candidate in my memory to say he “will investigate the veracity of U.S. economic statistics produced by Washington — including ‘the way they are reported.’”

I almost want him to win, if he actually did this.

Jeff Weimer said...

Support for Sanders may be an indication of that, but he represents a larger raft of lies that will end in misery.

Trump is a buffoon, I have little faith he will "draw back the veil".

Eaton Rapids Joe said...

Edward Deming, arguably the father of modern quality engineering, stated that the first step to improve quality and eliminate waste is to "Drive out Fear." It is not possible to manage people or processes when the measurement system is compromised.

Stalin was able to perpetrate the Ukrainian famines because bureaucrats were afraid to report actual, in-the-field yields. Consequently, too heavy a toll was levied on the Ukrainian farmers and not enough food was left to feed them through the 1932/33 and 1947/48 winters. Stalin probably thought a Ukrainian famine was a fine thing and the mis-reported harvests allowed him to "show" the world community that "there is plenty of food in the Ukraine."

Also, the Leningrad siege was made significantly worse by the fact that the city administrator lied about the amount of food that was in the warehouses. Stalin did not rush food to the about-to-be-cutoff city. Hundreds of thousands needlessly starved. All because bureaucrats were afraid to report the truth.

Perpetuating a fiction ultimately has consequences.

Judy said...

Joe Mama - wanting to report the truth can get you killed...Vince Foster. Reporting the truth will get you labeled a traitor and get you exiled...Edward Snowden. At this point we aren't much different than Stalin's Russia.

Anonymous said...

Dennis

Remember that the government does not record in it's numbers the number of people who have given up looking for a job or is not looking for work because of health problems. There is a third reason that I can not remember as well. So the real unemployment is higher then the number given by the government.