Are the government and the corporate media telling the truth about the unemployment rate?

Published by Dick Schaefer, Award-winning, Unpaid, Part-time Contributing Writer; Amateur Investigative Reporter; and Aspiring Photo-Journalist

Date:  1/29/2011
Post;  1,583



The following article is dated, but the writer, Kurt Nimmo, illustrates that the government (thru the Bureau of Labor Statistics) understates (lies about) unemployment statistics.  In December of 2010, the officially stated unemployment rate for Gasconade County was 10.1%.  In fact, were we to include all those who were under-employed as well as those who have become discouraged and are no longer actively look for a job, the rate would have been significantly higher

Kurt Nimmo

Infowars
December 4, 2009

Obama and the government are afraid Americans will soon be up in arms over the jobless recovery and the decline in their standard of living. In order to blindside them to the reality of an engineered impoverishment of society a precondition to world government — they routinely cook the figures on unemployment and then feed this to the corporate media.

For the first time in two years, the US economy came tantalizingly close to posting a monthly gain in jobs, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Employer payrolls fell by just 11,000 workers in November, much less than economists expected, according to a Labor Department report Friday. Also, the unemployment rate fell modestly, from 10.2 to 10 percent.

The long-suffering U.S. jobs market improved significantly in November, as employers trimmed the fewest jobs of any month since the start of the recession, and the unemployment rate posted the biggest one-month decline in more than three years, claims CNN. The unemployment rate improved to 10% in the month.

Nancy Pelosi said stealing money from future generations has put the nation on the path back to job growth and illustrates that the economic policies of President Obama and the Democratic Congress are starting to work.

Pelosi also blamed Obamas predecessor. Todays jobs report is evidence that our recovery efforts are moving our economy in the right direction. After losing an average of 673,000 jobs per month in the final three months of the Bush Administration, the report for November showed a job loss of 11,000 jobs — the lowest level since the recession began in December 2007.

Not so fast, says TrimTabs Investment Research.

In fact, the country lost 255,000 jobs in November, a negligible at best improvement of only 10.2% from the 284,000 jobs lost in October. We believe the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] is grossly underestimating current job losses due to their flawed survey methodology. Those flaws include rigid seasonal adjustments, a mysterious birth/death adjustment, and the fact that only 40% to 60% of the BLS survey is complete by the time of the first release and subject to revision, writes TrimTabs.

The BLS (or maybe it should be simply BS) stats may provide Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats with an excuse to claim we are on the mend, however chances are the BLS will eventually revise its pie-in-the-sky figures to reflect reality. In November, the BLS revised their September and October job losses down a surprising 44.5%, or 203,000 jobs. In the twelve months ending in October, the BLS revised their job loss estimates up or down by a staggering 679,000 jobs, or 13.0%. Until this past month, these revisions brought the BLS revised estimates to within a couple percent of TrimTabs original estimates.

As for the unemployment rate — claimed by the corporate media to be around 10 percent — this is smoke and mirrors too. In August, a Federal Reserve official admitted the real unemployment rate is 16 percent. If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.

In reality there are over 26 million Americans who are either jobless or underemployed. The real jobless rate takes into account part-time workers seeking full-time work, discouraged job seekers and persons furloughed from full-time to part-time status. The real rate of unemployment is 17.2% and is a more accurate indicator of the labor market, noted Americans for Democratic Action on December 3.

A vast majority of economists now agree that the current stimulative policies of current administration will lead to a period of slow economic growth and unacceptably high unemployment over the next decade. As of the end of October, more than 1 in every 6 Americans were unable to find full-time employment,

Others put the real unemployment number above 20 percent. If questionable tweaks to the governments statistical data are discarded, insists John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, the actual unemployment rate, as of July, was 20.6%. Not to scare you, but the situation is actually worse than it seems. Over the years, the government has changed the way it counts the unemployed. An example of this is the criticized Birth-Death Model which was added in 2000. The model is designed to account for the birth and death of businesses and the resultant lag in survey data. Unfortunately, the model doesnt work that well during economic contractions (like we have now) and consistently overstates the number of jobs being created each month.

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