Numbers that Lie

The BBC today displays the following post: "The US economy beat forecasts by adding 132,000 jobs last month, but the unemployment rate rose to 4.5%, according to Labor Department figures." These numbers can't possibly be true unless the ways of counting the employed and unemployed are faulty, and if they are faulty, then these numbers are meaningless.

So how is it that we can have people who are neither employed or unemployed getting jobs while employed people are losing theirs? Oh, they say, there were no people who were neither employed nor unemployed who got jobs. We merely decided to count more people as unemployed. Huh? People who where were neither employed nor unemployed last month and were therefore not counted as unemployed are unemployed this month because somebody decided to count them now?

This is the kind of gibberish that only a brain dead economist could devise. What America needs is a true unemployment figuresomething like a count of all able bodied people over a certain age who don't have jobs. That figure would be objective and would be more useful than the current bogus numbers that we are fed every month. Then we would truly know whether employment is rising or falling, and the numbers would show a higher unemployment rate than today's bogus figures do. (12/8/2006)

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