There Are Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics And The Employment Report

Last month the Government’s Bureau of Lies And Statistics served up an employment report purporting 312,000 new jobs in December. This despite massive seasonal retail lay-offs in the latter half of the month.  The BLS happily counts those jobs when hired in October but forgets to remove them when are dismissed at the end of the holiday shopping season. As John Williams (Shadow Government Statistics), the 312,000 jobs were created by re-doing the spreadsheets for prior months’ jobs reports:

Surging December payrolls were a reporting fraud, a canard, no more than massive prior-period revisions “recalculation of seasonal factors” that shifted growth from past months into the October 2018 to December 2018 time-frame, without showing the headline downside revisions to the earlier months from which the growth was borrowed

The same re-calc’ing of the spreadsheets created the 304,000 pop in jobs, December’s 312,000 print revised down to 222,000, with the jobs shifted into January’s number. But no one looks at the revisions, besides a handful of tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists.

My good friend and colleague, John Titus of Best Evidence videos wrote a scathing commentary on the nefarious Labor Force Participation Rate metric, which allegedly rose in January:

The labor force participation rate ticked up this month, from 63.1% last month to 63.2% this month. Great news, right? Umm, not unless shameless fraud designed to mask an economy headed for a depression is good news. The fraud in this case arises from the blatant manipulation of the two data points underlying the participation rate.

The participation rate is simply the number of people in the labor force divided by the working age population (the latter of which is called the civilian non-institutional population). Stated differently, the participation rate is the percentage of working age people who are working or looking for work. So the labor force is slightly larger than the straight-up number of workers because it includes workers PLUS anyone who’s looked for work in that last 4 weeks.

All three numbers—the participation rate, the labor force. and the working age population—are reported each month. But only the participation rate gets any media attention (and precious little at that). This month, as noted, the participation rate ticked up 01% as noted.

What’s curious, though, is that the labor force itself ticked down slightly, by 11,000 workers. For the participation rate to tick up, then, in the teeth of a shrinking labor force, means that the working age population had to have declined quite a bit. And that’s what’s weird—populations tend to increase, relentlessly so.

Indeed over the last 60 years (720 months), the working age population has ticked down only 8 times. And guess what? By far the largest two declines occurred recently—this month and in January 2017 (when Trump was inaugurated). In both cases, the working age population supposedly shrank by 650,000 people! Holy shit! Neither Wyoming nor Vermont have 650,000 people in total, much less 650,000 working age people. Did the media miss a couple of huge meteor hits?

The gloves are off now when it comes to fraudulent data manipulation, as the powers that be will do flat-out anything to disguise the gangrenous cadaver that is the U.S. economy. Sadly, the rot is concentrated among young people. who are now taking on huge amounts of educational debt—debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy—that would more properly be called welfare. This situation cannot sustain itself for very long, and won’t.

Basically all of our country’s ills are due to a monetary system predicated on fraudulent interest-bearing debt. Jefferson is rolling in his grave. I plan to go into this and a lot more when I re-launch my Youtube channel with an enhanced vlog-style format.