Honest Official Data
To tell the Bureau of Labor Statistics and others to stop massaging their stats to paint a pretty picture when it’s not.
(Note: underlined words/phrases correspond to links.)
The following is a continuation of the reasoning & rationale for the Bill-Request begun at Main Street Gov, summarized here.
With June 2015′s labor participation rate having sunk to about what we saw circa 1977 when a man going to work and a woman staying home was in style, by July 2 of 2015 the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics trumpeted an unemployment rate getting down to a new low of 5.3%.
As was to be expected, the Obama Administration’s kowtowing media joined in on the hoopla with headlines like Jobs Market Continues Its Fitful Recovery and The Jobs Recovery Is Going Strong.
But six months earlier, on Feb 3 2015, the Gallup organization’s head, Jim Clifton, would under the banner “The Big Lie — 5.6% Unemployment” write:
Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, the vast majority of them aren’t throwing parties to toast “falling” unemployment.
he’d add:
Gallup defines a good job as 30+ hours per week [in] an organization that provides a regular paycheck.
Forget 30+ hours — BLS considers you employed at even 3 hours, and would (if it could) count you as employed at 3 minutes.
he’d also add:
Right now, the U.S. is delivering at a staggeringly low rate of 44% [for] the number of full-time jobs as a percent of the adult population, 18 years and older.
To get his point across, perhaps Mr. Clifton ought to make himself an illustration of all that’s wrong with the way things get counted, by resigning from Gallup and applying for a job to head up the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
All kidding aside, this Bill-Request asks that Washington D.C. “Stop Scrubbing the Numbers to Paint a Pretty Picture, When it’s Not” when it comes to ALL official statistics.
Because without credibility to our official stats, the U.S. Government becomes no better than North Korea’s, where (as we said earlier) unemployment gets reported at 4-some percent, year after year, out of the abundance of jobs in the country’s great many forced labor camps.
