Utter BS, this is statistics USSR style. "Grain Harvest Sets Record!" in the middle of a famine.
They just move the goalposts, and redefine "unemployment."
Welcome to the USSA, comrades, where jobs drop, and so does the "official" unmemployment rate.
First, so far, all monthly BLS numbers for unemployment have been, later, ‘revised’ upwards.
Also, who would think of any Federal agency to have quality numbers. Just from memory, I recall the Air Force not knowing how many planes it had, couldn’t find a few, and had a few it didn’t even know about. Meanwhile Wal-Mart can tell you the exact number of Little Joey fishing poles, what store they are in, if they are on the shelves and so forth. Fed-Ex can tell where your new made in Taiwan laptop is.
GM was/is famous for not knowing physical plant, equipment, debts, liabilities, costs. It’s books are useless.
So too most governments. Why? Why do loser institutions have this trait? Because it is beneficial to those in the (dis)-organization, at lest short term.
By and large, with all the clerks, doctoral degrees statisticians, doctoral degrees economist, our present economic state was unforeseen.
Like the Global Warming delusion, the Feds numbers are junk. They’ll tell you that. Further their ‘model’ which doesn’t and hasn’t ever predicted anything is junk too.
Even the present economy, save by the bears like James Grant, and the Austrians was unpredicted by the private market. Why? Because it is too complex, there is too much going on, you can not have enough people with enough computer power to figure out what a billion economic actors are going to do.
If you do, it is no more reliable than being at a blackjack table and betting strong because you ‘are hot’ or the ‘cards are going your way’.
We want to be able to believe. The people with the nice, pensioned, in by 9 out by 3 jobs at the Bureau of Labor Statistics want to believe, or if not will sell the notion, just like central planning clerks in the Soviet Union sold the newest 5 year plan.
These are all yes men, but instead of agreeing over booze with the boss at some late afternoon lunch, they tell them what they want to hear with numbers.
Exactly! My thoughts are since they are working on a “jobs” bill they want to show that spending actually works to fix the problem. So they will claim the stimuls is working and we just need more of it.