Just last week the White House was oh so excited as it made the announcement that unemployment had dropped for the fifth consecutive month and was now resting quite comfortably at 8.3 percent, the lowest it has been in nearly three years. Supposedly this miracle came about after 243,000 jobs miraculously appeared, at least according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But was this claim nothing but one more, on a long list of many, works of fiction generated by a very ethically challenged White House? I mean, just who is it that supposedly hired all of those people? All I've been reading about is how more and more people continue to get laid off. Well, apparently now there are more than a few financial experts who are now saying that the figures may have been manipulated (oh no say it isn't so) and that the significant drop in employment has more to do with the fact that the federal agency charged with computing key economic data has significantly decreased the number of Americans in the workforce than it does with people actually finding employment. Gee ya think? Why would anyone simply assume that this, the most corrupt, administration would be above doing such a thing?
“If you hold the workforce participation rate constant over the past year,” GOP economist Matt McDonald of Hamilton Place Strategies said Monday on CNBC’s Squawk Box, “unemployment would be about 8.9 percent instead of 8.3 percent. So it is a weird number that is out there, and I think people have to be looking at that carefully.” But even the 8.9 percent is far from being anywhere near an accurate portrayal of just how bad the present employment picture is in this country. It was the same Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report that showed unemployment dropping to 8.3 percent that also showed total workforce participation, that is the number of people either working or looking for work, declining by 1.2 million people in a single month. So what we're being told here is the actual unemployment rate is a number that is determined by dividing the number of unemployed job-seekers by the total labor force. So if you reduce the number of workers in the overall workforce, then Barry "Almighty" administration can show that actual unemployment is dropping, when, in fact, improvement has been marginal at best. And for some bizarre reason, we're stupid enough to believe it all.
A growing number of economists, at least those who take their worth their salt, as they say, feel that the official statistics as they are currently being touted by the White House, seriously underestimate just how bad our present unemployment situation really is. What's being perpetrated here, against the American people, is something that amounts to nothing more than a blatant fraud. And many of those economists maintain, and it's something that only makes sense, that the key measure in determining an accurate picture of our unemployment situation would be to use the number of people who would like to have a job, but can’t find one. Currently, when people retire from the workforce due to the aging of the nation’s population or give up looking for work due to prolonged unemployment, the BLS declares the unemployed person a “discouraged worker.” At that point they are listed by the BLS as “marginally attached to the workforce” and are no longer considered to be part of the nation’s working population. Dropping them off the employment calculations keeps the unemployment rate substantially lower than it otherwise would be, and has been key to the improvements in the unemployment numbers during the past year.
Some fella by the name Tyler Durden of Zerohedge.com writes: “It appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million.” In fact, Zerohedge notes that BLS is breaking records in claims about the shrinking workforce. To the point where the most recent unemployment number was based on the assertion that the entire U.S. workforce has shrunk to a 30-year low. An analysis by Joseph Curl of the Washington Times shows the labor force as a percentage of the available population hit 66 percent in October 1988, and remained there throughout the presidency of George H. W. Bush. It then reached 67 percent or better for 40 straight months during President Bill Clinton’s presidency, and was above 66 percent for virtually all of President George W. Bush’s presidency. But then along came Barry "Almighty’s" first year in office, and it had dipped to 64.6 percent, before dipping further to just 63.7 percent last month, its lowest point in almost three decades. Perhaps this can safely be considered yet another after effect of "Hope and Change?" And yet this guy sees himself as being deserving of a second term. Freakin amazing!
One analyst in particular, is very critical of how the BLS uses math of the fuzzy sort to arrive at its employment figures. That would be TrimTabs.com CEO Charles Biderman. His firm uses what he considers to be a much more modern and timely measurement to determine the level of unemployment and he is confident that it provides a much more accurate result. Actual tax receipts to the IRS are used to calculate employment. By his firm’s calculations, the economy only added 44,000 jobs in January, which is not even enough to keep the unemployment rate from growing. “The [BLS numbers] are just guesses,” Biderman said in a recent interview. “I don’t know whether they’re politically motivated or not." Well with the White House now doing "cartwheels" over the positive jobs numbers being promulgated from the BLS, I think it very safe to say that there is rather a good chance that there most certainly more than a few political shenanigans going on here. And in his continuing effort to blow smoke up our collective butt, Barry said, "These numbers will go up and down in the coming months, and there's still far too many Americans who need a job or need a job that pays better than the one they have now.” Adding, “But the economy is growing stronger.” And what world is it that he's living in?
Ok everybody, it should be painfully obvious by now to everybody with half a brain that we can believe nothing that comes out of this administration regarding our current employment crisis. Look, I am far from being naïve enough to think that Barry is the first one to ever come along who was willing to manipulate the numbers so as to make them appear to be more favorable to himself. But having said that, I do think it very safe to say that there has never been, at least in recent memory, an administration who has done so to the same level. Nor has there been one so deceitful nor blatantly dishonest in their efforts to portray their cockamamie numbers as being fact. The entire last three years have consisted of nothing more than smoke and mirrors. We had a bogus "stimulus" package that zipped through a Democrat controlled Congress like sh!t through a goose and we were told that it would prevent unemployment from going over 8 percent, we had control of our own healthcare ripped from our hands with the claim being made that as a result, costs would go down and we heard as nauseam that green energy was the way to a brighter more prosperous American future. And it was all nothing more that lies piled upon lies, heaped upon even more lies.
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