Masters of Unemployment Prestidigitation

Masters of Unemployment Prestidigitation

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,” said Mark Twain. Less memorable and catchy is the line that “Statistics are the products of propagandists.”

Both apply to the government’s announcement that the nation’s unemployment rate dropped minimally to 8.9% and a piddling 192,000 new jobs were added nationwide in February, which still left 13,700,000 people out of work. Still, the numbers do represent an improvement in the job market since the November rate of 9.8%.

Then we get to other bad news: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that black unemployment stands at 15.3%, hispanic at 11.6%, teenagers at 23.9%, with 2.7 million “marginally attached,” part-timers and workers who had given up looking for jobs, a number up 200,000 in a year: http://tiny.cc/c6yo6

Now comes the realy bad news: The BLS numbers are baloney. As CNBC’s Rick Santelli pointed out on Friday in “Good Jobs Report Has a Dark Side,” things are not always what they appear to be.

Government stats fall short of reality by not factoring into the good news the bad news of America’s incredible shrinking work force.

As Santelli explained, “The government’s definition of the labor force is all individuals 16 years of age and older, who are employed or seeking employment. It does not include students; retirees; anyone with unreported income, or ‘discouraged’ workers. . . meaning the percentage of Americans not working or even trying to join the work force is at a near three-decade high.”

For the non-economists out there, a layman’s translation . . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=3816)