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After our post on the Bureau of Labor Standard’s unemployment reports, a reader and good friend wrote; “You need more than what you wrote to credibly attack the BLS. Have you any thing more?” In fact there is much more but it is poorly organized and hard to understand. We have selected three items that address how the BLS reports are produced
You will learn something about how the reports are created, and you will also learn the numbers are very easy to manipulate. The key thing to remember is the manipulation always favor one political party. It is important to know the labor reports are a product of 60,000 interviews conducted by the Census Bureau every month in contract for the Dept. of Labor.
We have a NY Post article contemporaneous (November 18, 2012) to the 2012 ”miracle” when the unemployment rate dropped to 7.8%. The article was titled Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy. …
… I hope the next stop will be Congress, since manipulation of data like this not only gives voters the wrong impression of the economy but also leads lawmakers, the Federal Reserve and companies to make uninformed decisions.
To cite just one instance, the Fed is targeting the curtailment of its so-called quantitative easing money-printing/bond-buying fiasco to the unemployment rate for which Census provided the false information.
So falsifying this would, in essence, have dire consequences for the country.
On the same day as the NY Post article above and working with it, Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden posted on the BLS report.
On Friday October 5, 2012, the BLS released what was arguably the most important report of Obama’s first term: the final jobs number, and unemployment rate before the November 2012 presidential election. As so many predicted, it “plunged” from 8.1% to 7.8% allowing the president to conduct countless teleprompted speeches praising the success of his economic recovery. It also served as the basis for the infamous Jack Welch tweet: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers” and prompted the pro-Obama media to quickly brand all those who questioned it as conspiracy theorists. …
Four years later in October 2016, Tyler Durden takes exception to the retiring president’s star turn on job creation. This suffers from the lack of an editor, but there are many nuggets of information here. However, you will come to understand why this was not included originally.
Bismarck’s dictum “mankind should not see how laws and sausages are made” will ring true as you read this. But remember when we started we saw how the BLS produced reports that were always favoring the Democrat party.
… So, before President Obama takes his final victory lap with claims of creating the most robust employment recovery since the 1990’s, the data clearly suggests otherwise.
Of course, if you ask the 37% that are no longer counted as part of the labor force, they will tell you the same thing. …
In a similar vein, Matthew Continetti addresses the issue of who is going to run the government. He starts with Gen. Flynn’s troubles and then shows how, what some have called the ‘deep state,’ is trying to wrest control of the government from the people we elected.
… Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year’s election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.
How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this,” a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured. …
… The last few weeks have confirmed that there are two systems of government in the United States. The first is the system of government outlined in the U.S. Constitution—its checks, its balances, its dispersion of power, its protection of individual rights. Donald Trump was elected to serve four years as the chief executive of this system. Whether you like it or not.
The second system is comprised of those elements not expressly addressed by the Founders. This is the permanent government, the so-called administrative state of bureaucracies, agencies, quasi-public organizations, and regulatory bodies and commissions, of rule-writers and the byzantine network of administrative law courts. This is the government of unelected judges with lifetime appointments who, far from comprising the “least dangerous branch,” now presume to think they know more about America’s national security interests than the man elected as commander in chief.
For some time, especially during Democratic presidencies, the second system of government was able to live with the first one. But that time has ended. The two systems are now in competition. And the contest is all the more vicious and frightening because more than offices are at stake. This fight is not about policy. It is about wealth, status, the privileges of an exclusive class. …