Cooking The Books

Much bravado emitted from the lips, via the teleprompter, of Obama concerning the unemployment rate dropping to 8.5%. Now I'm not saying that it isn't a good thing for American workers to be able to return to the work force. It is how the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) arrives at the numbers they put out as gospel and if there is any "political" motivation involved in cooking the books to try to get from Point "A" to "Point "B." You can try that magic trick in many variations but in reality you're still standing at Point "A" when everything is said and done.

To add to that equation is the fact that the average American fails to understand just how that number is derived and the people that were omitted for various reasons from the counting of heads. The other factor that is often failed to even gain an honorable mention is the fact that in the month of December, the month in question, there is a variance due to the upswing in seasonal employment that disappears after everyone has been skinned by the retailers of the world. I've been taking a hard look at how the BLS has been cooking the books which gives Joe Tentpeg a case of the fuzzies which he shouldn't necessarily have. Lets take a look.

Progress can sometimes be quite deceiving, especially when dealing with federal bureaucrats who seem to owe their allegiance to an individual rather than the truth.

The basic problem is "under counting." It's a great way to cook any set of books, just don't report what should actually be reported. When the government does this to make it appear that the unemployment in the nation is going down, rather than up or remaining the same, it is nothing more than a smoke and mirrors routine. Now they wouldn't do that, would they? So what is missing from these reports? Glad you asked.

First thing missing is the 1.2 million seekers of employment who have been added to the population in the past year without being added to the work force number. That deflates the unemployment figure because they aren't being counted because they aren't collecting unemployment or for other various reasons. You have to have sustained employment in order to collect unemployment in case you didn't know that. It should be noted that the government itself has created a convoluted system whereby the longer a job recession continues on then the reliability of the numbers comes into question.

Here's the magic trick and this has been going on since 1994 when the BLS stopped counting the "terminally" unemployed. Another term used is the "long term discouraged worker" who has thrown in the towel on looking for a job. Note that when you stop looking for work over a period of time, you're not a number worth considering. Nothing suspicious about that now is there? You aren't even a number anymore in the thinking of a numbers cruncher at that point.

The straight talk that you fail to hear from the Lame Stream Media deals with facts and figures and not some phony magic trick. Lets look at reality now for a few minutes. Using December 2010 as our reference there were approximately 239 million Americans available to be useful in the work force. During this past year that number has risen by 1.6 million people. Doing the math increases that to 240.5 million potential workers. You following along? But wait. Of those 1.6 million red-blooded Americans, the BLS has only added 274,000. Where did the rest of them go? Did we off shore them along with jobs?

This is where a concept called the "participation rate" rears its head. At a rate of 64% 1.1 million workers should have been added to the rolls. However strange it may seem the participation rate during the last year dropped from 64,3% down to 64%. What this does is drop the number of people available to the workforce, which they really are available for, which makes for a lower unemployment number. I'm trying to keep this simple so even a 5th grader can see what is going on here.

Using what I just pointed out, if they really used numbers based in reality, the effective unemployment figure would be 10.9%. There was no movement per se, only in the way the books are cooked. Zero Hedge has calculated the participation rate at 65.8%. Using that participation rate. Using that rate, which I would believe before I believed anything the BLS puts out, there are 4.4 million workers missing from the count. What Zero Hedge has found is that if the BLS continues to use a downward spiral of the participation rate that rate will hit zero by the time the general election occurs. Strange? Why would anyone put anything past Obama, the saver of jobs, in order for him to continue to baffle us with BS without the accompanying brilliance?

Here's a useful quote I found to help illustrate my point: It won't surprise anyone that as of December, the real implied unemployment rate was 11.4% - basically where it has been ever since 2009 - and at 2.9% delta to reported, represents the widest divergence to reported data since the early 1980s. And because we know this will be the next question, extending this lunacy, America will officially have no unemployed, when the Labor Force Participation rate hits 58.5%, which should be just before the presidential election.

Yeah, well tell that to the 20 million Americans they are still counting standing in the unemployment lines. Is this an assault upon the truth? Why cook the books in order to give someone a warm fuzzy about something that reality doesn't support? Just how important is the truth to you? The truth according to Obama is a sham. We've seen gun running being covered up and lied about by this administration, we've seen a health care bill passed that no one knew exactly what was in it when they signed off on it (much book cooking is being discovered in that signature piece of legislation), his total disregard for immigration law and recess appointments comes to my mind. All those prerogatives we're witnessing Obama pull out of his magic hat without constitutional authority should give pause for any thinking American to examine. If he actually taught anything to the students he professes to have taught about the US Constitution I wonder what it was.

So a little thing like have the BLS cooking the books to perpetuate a lie is but a minor speed bump for the Deceiver-In-Chief himself. How about we start serving up the truth instead of magic tricks that are meant to deceive the American people? I'm just askin...

As Always,

The Frog Prince