Are We Getting Bogus Employment Data?

From Zero Hedge:

…we have discovered that while revisions added a whopping 55k jobs in the years 2006-2008, NFPs have now been revised to remove 538k jobs in the 2009-2010 period. In other words, based on data revisions, under President Obama, America has suddenly created over half a million jobs less …  simply due to statistical adjustments.

The revisions happen because when you get that monthly jobs report, its really no more than a sophisticated guess of what is happening.  Usually it has been pretty close to reality – and thus only a 55,000 revision for all the jobs data from 2006-08; that sort of adjustment is statistical variation.  But for us to suddenly “lose” 538,000 jobs over the 2009-10 period indicates that either the BLS suddenly got grossly incompetent right about the time Obama was sworn in, or someone decided along the line to fudge the numbers.

I’m going with “fudge”.  It just isn’t credible that a mistake as large as 538k can happen.  Nor is it credible that during a period of alleged economic recovery (remember, the official stats show the recession ended in 2009) we have ever lower numbers of people participating in the economy.  It seems that 500,000 people left the labor force last month – which accounts for why unemployment went down to 9.0% rather than rising to 10%.  Only a pathetic 36,000 jobs were created last month (comparison – Canada, with about 10% of America’s population, created 69,200 jobs) – the sort of jobs numbers one can associate with a recession, not with recovery.

And yet the official unemployment rate went down – as if someone, some where, wants to knock it down so that if it starts to rise, it will rise towards 10% instead of 11%.  So that it will remain in single digits rather than becoming a politically devastating “double digit” unemployment rate.

What we’ll have to do is get someone in the House to show the guts to really investigate this – and then see how successful we are at getting documents and testimony out of the Obama Administration.  There is just too much strangeness going on here for anyone to trust the data – and we need to know where we really stand, Obama’s re-election chances be darned.

Read more at Noonan for Nevada