Phony Numbers, Phony Recovery, Phony President
SPECIAL
Mark Twain once wrote, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned
lies and statistics.” The phony jobs numbers issued last week and used
by the phony President to tout a phony recovery are typical of the lies,
damned lies and statistics spouted out daily by the political elites.
The elites walking the halls of power — the true 1 percent — are
greedy and murderous psychopaths. They care nothing for their “subjects”
and seek only more power, more money and more aggrandizement. They
readily lie, cheat, steal and kill to achieve their goals.
The 7.8 percent unemployment number is a manipulated and meaningless
figure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics cooks the books each month by
using data it terms as “seasonally adjusted.” But this adjustment
changes from month to month, and the BLS will not disclose what the
adjustments are or how they are arrived at. It also does not tell the
public that those factors change month to month.
John Williams at Shadowstats.com explains: “[T]he BLS knowingly has
been preparing the seasonally-adjusted headline unemployment numbers on
an inconsistent and non-comparable basis for some time. The September
number was prepared using a different set of season factors than was
used in coming up with the August number. The reporting difference can
be large, when proper consistent month-to-month changes are used.”
In addition to applying nebulous and ever-changing seasonal
adjustments, the numbers are based in part on information compiled by
census workers conducting telephone surveys and home visits. They take
monthly samples
of 50,000 to 60,000 households in 31 States and the District of
Columbia. Their criteria are ambiguous. For instance, the range for
part-time work falls between one hour and 34 hours per week. “So if an
out-of-work accountant tells a census worker, ‘I got one baby-sitting
job this week just to cover my kid’s bus fare, but I haven’t been able
to find anything else,’ this can be considered a part-time job,” writes
Jack Welch in an op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal.
Because of the subjective and open-ended nature of some responses,
the opportunity for data manipulation is legion. There is also a motive
for data manipulation. Government workers conducting these tests and
compiling the data are members of the
American Federation of Government Employees,
which is part of the AFL-CIO. Unions are in the tank for the Democratic
Party in general and President Barack Obama in particular.
Welch came under fire last week after he tweeted that he was
skeptical of the sudden three-tenths of 1 percent drop in unemployment
on the heels of Obama’s dismal debate performance.
As an aside, that debate revealed what I and many others have known
for some time: Obama is a phony.
He’s an empty suit (or chair) without
the capacity for intelligent discussion beyond standard rote Marxist
talking points, unless one of his masters has a hand up the back of his
shirt in the form of a teleprompter. He has demonstrated this time and
again through his choice of softball and heavily scripted interviews and
the way he has responded as a petulant child to what few challenges he
has received from the rare tough interviewer or the occasional
Republican politician.
One of Welch’s critics last week was Austan Goolsbee, former chairman
of the Obama regime’s Council of Economic Advisers. Demonstrating that,
for the elites, history begins today and yesterday is irrelevant,
Goolsbee conveniently forgets that just nine years ago he accused the
George W. Bush Administration of cooking up phony unemployment numbers.
In an op-ed piece for
The New York Times published Nov. 30, 2003, Goolsbee wrote:
The government reported that annual unemployment during
this recession peaked at only around 6 percent, compared with more than 7
percent in 1992 and more than 9 percent in 1982. But the unemployment
rate has been low only because government programs, especially Social
Security disability, have effectively been buying people off the
unemployment rolls and reclassifying them as “not in the labor force.”
In other words, the government has cooked the books. It has been a
more subtle manipulation than the one during the Ronald Reagan
Administration, when people serving in the military were reclassified
from “not in the labor force” to “employed” in order to reduce the
unemployment rate. Nonetheless, the impact has been the same.
Under Obama, disability roles have risen in excess of 3.6 million
since 2008, meaning Obama is using the same method of concealing true
unemployment as the hated Bush.
According to Shadowstats, data manipulation has its roots in the Richard Nixon Administration.
Williams writes
that Nixon proposed that the BLS release each month one unemployment
number — the one that was most favorable to the Administration — but not
reveal whether it was the seasonally adjusted or unadjusted number.
While there is no evidence this tactic was ever used, it demonstrates
the mindset in Washington.
Even if one takes the official 7.8 percent number and BLS statistics
at face value, they’re still nothing to crow about. Besides, the 7.8
percent number will not remain static. The BLS revises the data
regularly and won’t issue a final number for the month until January,
long after the election and when the September number is no longer
relevant. The September number could change four or five times before
January.
According to the BLS,
total nonfarm payroll employment increased by only 114,000 in
September. That’s not enough to keep up with population growth. It’s
also 32,000 fewer jobs than the monthly average for this year, and
39,000 fewer jobs than the monthly average in 2011. Manufacturing jobs
declined by 16,000 and overall have been unchanged since April. Yet we
are to believe unemployment dropped?
The number of people employed part-time for economic reasons (that is
they took part-time work because their hours were cut back or it was
the only work available to them) rose from 8 million to 8.6 million.
Another 802,000 dropped from the labor force and weren’t counted in the
jobless data, and they became part of the 2.5 million considered
marginally attached to the labor force because they “wanted and were
available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12
months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not
searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.”
Despite the rah-rah chanting of Obamaphiles, the truth is the number
of people employed is near where it was in 2000 and well below where it
was at its 2007 pre-recession peak. Actual unemployment, according to
Shadowstats, exceeds 22 percent.
The Feds are likewise manipulating the inflation data. Called the
Consumer Price Index (CPI), it is a measure of inflation based on the
cost of a basket of goods. But the contents of the basket changes from
time to time. Politicians like this because it is used to determine,
among other things, the annual cost-of-living adjustments for Social
Security. By manipulating the contents of the basket of goods, rising
inflation can be masked and Social Security adjustments can be kept
artificially low.
Using pre-Bill Clinton CPI methodology (that is, methodology employed
until 1990), CPI inflation in August (September numbers are due out
tomorrow) was 5.6 percent. Using methodology employed in 1980, CPI
inflation in August was 9.3 percent, according to Shadowstats.
This is all part of the ongoing war on American seniors and savers being waged by the psychopaths in Washington.
