When Unemployment Number Massaging Is Confirmed, Will Anything Happen To Those Who Promoted This Fraud? Or Will They Get A Free Pass As Every Other Liar In This Administration?

CENSUS BUREAU ACCUSED OF FALSIFYING UNEMPLOYMENT NUMBERS

By: John Hayward  
11/19/2013 10:31 AM

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If this story from the New York Post is confirmed, it’s one of the blockbuster stories of the decade.  It looks as if suspicions that the Labor Department’s unemployment surveys include false data have been borne out:

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.

In essence, the monthly unemployment report is complied from two surveys: employer and household.  The employer survey tends to be fairly accurate, since companies naturally maintain reliable real-time data about how many people they employ.  But it’s not inclusive enough, because there are forms of employment it doesn’t catch, so a survey of 60,000 households is also conducted, and the results are factored into the final Labor Department report.

The Labor Department doesn’t actually conduct the household survey.  They farm it out to the Census Bureau…. which just happens to have been moved under the command of the White House in 2009.  It’s one of the first things Barack Obama did when he took office.  There was sharp criticism of the move at the time, from people who worried that the Census data would be manipulated by White House operatives for political purposes.  From a February 2009 report by Fox News:

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told FOX News on Monday that he finds it hard to believe the Obama administration felt the need to place re-evaluation of the inner workings of the census so high on his to-do list, just three weeks into his presidency.

“This is nothing more than a political land grab,” Chaffetz said.

Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, told the Salt Lake Tribune that the move “shouldn’t happen.” He and Chaffetz are trying to rally Republicans “before its too late.”

“It takes something that is supposedly apolitical like the census, and gives it to a guy who is infamously political,” Bishop said of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who would be tasked with overseeing the census at the White House.

[...] “The last thing the census needs is for any hard-bitten partisan (either a Karl Rove or a Rahm Emanuel) to manipulate these critical numbers. Many federal funding formulas depend on them, as well as the whole fabric of federal and state representation. Partisans have a natural impulse to tilt the playing field in their favor, and this has to be resisted,” Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, told FOX News in an e-mail.

To return to the New York Post expose, a Census worker was caught fabricating data for the household survey in 2010… and “a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee – that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012, and continues today.”

The employee who got in trouble back in 2010 says there was pressure from higher-ups to reach a 90 percent response rate on those survey phone calls, and he was told to fabricate as much data as necessary to hit the target each month.  According to the Post, the details of his case have never been disclosed until now.  Evidently the Census Bureau didn’t even tell the Labor Department about it.  Some Census officials wondered why a more far-reaching investigation was not initiated.

To turn a skeptical eye toward the Post report, the allegations about phony unemployment data cooked deliberately to make Obama’s economy look better (well, less awful) before the 2012 election look to be supposition on the part of writer John Crudele, based on what his source told him.  Crudele’s piece includes no further testimony from the source to support the accusation that fraudulent activity intensified during the election, or that it was deliberately intended to assist the Obama campaign.

Crudele makes it clear he’s a longtime critic of the politicized Census Bureau – among other things, he thinks they were deliberately churning through their own temporary workers to inflate employment figures in 2010 – and he says he’s ready to hand over all of his materials on this new scandal to investigators from the Labor Department and Congress.

It’s worth remembering that the September 2012 jobs report was particularly anomalous, including a hard-to-explain drop in the official unemployment rate from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent, which of course was touted heavily by the Obama political machine as evidence that his job-creation policies were working.  (And they’re still working, because last month the unemployment rate… whoops, it went up to 7.3 percent, and the true unadjusted rate remains mired in double digits, where it has been ever since Obama took office.)

As The Blaze recalls, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch was tarred and feathered by the media for saying, via Twitter, “Unbelievable jobs numbers.  These Chicago guys will do anything…. can’t debate so change numbers.”  He later conceded that the wording of this statement was “incendiary,” but stood by his criticism that the September totals were “downright implausible,” and had been deliberately manipulated.

For my part, as a longtime student of the fascinating process of compiling unemployment reports, I’ve always been skeptical of claims that the figures weredeliberately manipulated in a crude and direct way.  They’re inaccurate as hell, because the process of compiling the report is enormously complex.  It takes time for the data to roll in.  As noted above, a good deal of it boils down to taking a monthly poll and asking if the respondents have a job, and we all know how even the most clinical poll can include mistakes and anomalies.  I suspect most of the number-crunchers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics would rather wait two or three months to release any conclusive reports, because the figures really aren’t ready in the first week of the following month, when the much-discussed headline-generating unemployment report is expected.

I am, in short, willing to cut the crew at BLS a lot of slack.  But the story Crudele tells at the New York Post is plausible, and he’s got sources to back it up.  Further investigation seems warranted, including an investigation into why none of this has been investigated until now.  I’m going to want harder evidence before I buy into a deliberate conspiracy to cook the numbers in the last few months before the election.  I’m not ruling it out – the Obama Administration’s dishonest conduct has left it a free-fire zone for cynicism.  But that doesn’t mean a sensational allegation like this should be taken immediately at face value, especially since it would appear that a Census scramble to pump up its response numbers could produce the same effect, without an explicitly political motivation.  Crudele seems confident that such a motivation existed.  He’s right to call for official investigations to confirm or deny it, especially since other important decisions are influenced by the unemployment report on a constant basis.

Another View Of The Unemployment Fake

U.S. unemployment rate ‘faked,’ N.Y. Post critic charges

November 19, 2013, 10:50 AM

A longtime critic of how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated is at it again: New York Post columnist John Crudele claims the government manipulated Census data in such a sway to cause the jobless rate to drop sharply right before the 2012 presidential election.

Now Crudele also says he has a source to prove it – and he’s willing to share the name with government and congressional investigators.

Believable? Critics of President Obama certainly think so, judging by the responses. Rick Santelli, the CNBC market analyst often credited as a godfather of the Tea Party movement, said on-air Tuesday that he also long suspected the unemployment rate was misleading.

Yet Crudele’s repeated charges of data manipulation have never been verified by any other news organization or even by a partisan political outfit. The compilation of Census data and whether people are working is a complicated process involving a great deal of statistical analysis that can mystify a non-economist. It would be easy to get things wrong.

In other words, no one else has seen this Loch Ness monster.

By late Tuesday, the Census released a statement disavowing any knowledge of data tampering. “We have no reason to believe that there was a systematic manipulation of the data described in media reports,” the agency said.

Census said information offered by Crudele has been passed on to the Office of the Inspector General, which investigates complaints of government malfeasance

Crudele’s charge centers on allegedly fraudulent activity in the  Philadelphia area. But even if such fraud occurred, it’s hard to believe that the results from one city could dramatically alter the nation’s unemployment rate.

In September 2012, the official unemployment rate surprisingly fell to 7.8% from 8.1% just two months before President Obama defeated Republican challenger Mitt Romney. And it’s been falling ever since, touching a low of 7.2% a few months ago.

Part of the reason: Fewer people are looking for work because jobs are still hard to find. People who stop looking for work are not counted in the unemployment statistics.

Crudele has previously accused the Census bureau of falsifying data, but a top government official strongly denied those charges.

Whatever the truth, few if any Americans really believe the labor market is healthy despite a falling unemployment rate. Some 22 million Americans can’t get a good job and many young people are having a hard time finding work after they leave college. Times aren’t as tough as they were a few years ago, but they are still tough. The unemployment rate is closer to 14% if people forced to work part time and those who want a job are included.

- Jeffry Bartash

Unemployment Rate Faked In Late 2012. The Lies From This Administration Continue. Is There Anything That We Can Believe Or If There Lips Are Moving, They Must Be Lying!

In late 2012, we were incredulous that the unemployment rate could be falling as it was being reported. We were not alone in that concern as there were other notables such as Jack Welch and Donald Trump who felt the same and said so. We knew intuitively that the numbers were cooked and now, we have been proven correct.

We wonder what the pundits and Presidential spooksmen who called us names, demeaned our credibility and blatantly denied any messin' with the numbers are going to say now. We are sure they will continue the lie as that is the way  the White House operates.

The bottom line is that this is another of those lies that we have been subjected to while Obama and his ilk have been in the White House. When are Americans going to say, "This is enough" and throw the bums out?  

When government statistics are manipulated and massaged to give an appearance of something they are not, we have a problem. Can we trust anything that this government/administration says or does. We don't think so.

Can we trust them on foreign affairs? Hardly!  Can we trust them on health care? That horse is long gone.  Can we trust them on defense? No way when they are allowing Iran to get nukes.  Can they be believed when they say the job market is improving? No way.

We have NO trust in government anymore. How about you?

Conservative Tom

Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report

By John Crudele

November 18, 2013 | 8:06pm

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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.

And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.

“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.

The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.

Ironically, it was Labor’s demanding standards that left the door open to manipulation.

Labor requires Census to achieve a 90 percent success rate on its interviews — meaning it needed to reach 9 out of 10 households targeted and report back on their jobs status.

Census currently has six regions from which surveys are conducted. The New York and Philadelphia regions, I’m told, had been coming up short of the 90 percent.

Philadelphia filled the gap with fake interviews.

“It was a phone conversation — I forget the exact words — but it was, ‘Go ahead and fabricate it’ to make it what it was,” Buckmon told me.

Census, under contract from the Labor Department, conducts the household survey used to tabulate the unemployment rate.

Interviews with some 60,000 household go into each month’s jobless number, which currently stands at 7.3 percent. Since this is considered a scientific poll, each one of the households interviewed represents 5,000 homes in the US.

Buckmon, it turns out, was a very ambitious employee. He conducted three times as many household interviews as his peers, my source said.

By making up survey results — and, essentially, creating people out of thin air and giving them jobs — Buckmon’s actions could have lowered the jobless rate.

Buckmon said he filled out surveys for people he couldn’t reach by phone or who didn’t answer their doors.

But, Buckmon says, he was never told how to answer the questions about whether these nonexistent people were employed or not, looking for work, or have given up.

But people who know how the survey works say that simply by creating people and filling out surveys in their name would boost the number of folks reported as employed.

Census never publicly disclosed the falsification. Nor did it inform Labor that its data was tainted.

“Yes, absolutely they should have told us,” said a Labor spokesman. “It would be normal procedure to notify us if there is a problem with data collection.”

Census appears to have looked into only a handful of instances of falsification by Buckmon, although more than a dozen instances were reported, according to internal documents.

In one document from the probe, Program Coordinator Joal Crosby was ask in 2010, “Why was the suspected … possible data falsification on all (underscored) other survey work for which data falsification was suspected not investigated by the region?”

On one document seen by The Post, Crosby hand-wrote the answer: “Unable to determine why an investigation was not done for CPS,” or the Current Population Survey — the official name for the unemployment report.

With regard to the Consumer Expenditure survey, only four instances of falsification were looked into, while 14 were reported.

I’ve been suspicious of the Census Bureau for a long time.

During the 2010 Census report — an enormous and costly survey of the entire country that goes on for a full year — I suspected (and wrote in a number of columns) that Census was inexplicably hiring and firing temporary workers.

I suspected that this turnover of employees was being done purposely to boost the number of new jobs being report each month. (The Labor Department does not use the Census Bureau for its other monthly survey of new jobs — commonly referred to as the Establishment Survey.)

Last week I offered to give all the information I have, including names, dates and charges to Labor’s inspector general.

I’m waiting to hear back from Labor.

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.

Unemployment Lies and Obfuscation

Staring Armageddon In The Face, But Hiding It With Official Lies

March 12, 2013 by Paul Craig Roberts 

PHOTOS.COM

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy created 236,000 new jobs in February. If you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll let you have at a good price.

Where are these alleged jobs? The BLS says 48,000 were created in construction. That is possible, considering that revenue-starved real estate developers are misreading the housing situation.

Then there are 23,700 new jobs in retail trade, which is hard to believe considering the absence of consumer income growth and the empty parking lots at shopping malls.

The real puzzle is 20,800 jobs in motion picture and sound recording industries. This is the first time in the years that I have been following the jobs reports that there has been enough employment for me to even notice this category.

The BLS lists 10,900 jobs in accounting and bookkeeping, which, as it is approaching income tax time, is probably correct; 21,000 jobs in temporary help and business support services; 39,000 jobs in healthcare and social assistance; and 18,800 jobs in the old standby: waitresses and bartenders.

That leaves about 50,000 jobs sprinkled around the various categories, but not in numbers large enough to notice.

The presstitute media attributed the drop in the headline unemployment rate (U3) to 7.7 percent from 7.9 percent to the happy jobs report. But Rex Nutting at Market Watch says that the unemployment rate fell because 130,000 unemployed people who have been unable to find a job and became discouraged were dropped out of the U3 measure of unemployment. The official U6 measure, which counts some discouraged workers, shows an unemployment rate of 14.3 percent. Statistician John Williams’ measure, which counts all discouraged workers (people who have ceased looking for a job), is 23 percent.

In other words, the real rate of unemployment is 2 to 3 times the reported rate.

Nutting believes that the U3 unemployment rate has become too politicized to have any meaning. He suggests using instead the workforce participation rate. This rate is falling substantially, reflecting the discouragement that occurs from inability to find jobs.

Williams (shadowstats.com) says that distortions in seasonal factor adjustments overstate monthly payroll employment by about 100,000 jobs. The jobs data that is not seasonally adjusted shows about 1.5 million fewer jobs in the economy.

In a recent communication, statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) reports that the rigged official annual rate of consumer inflation (CPI) of 1.6 percent is in fact, as measured by the official U.S. government methodology of 1990, 9.2 percent. In other words, the rate of inflation is 5.75 times greater than the reported rate. If Williams is correct, the interest rate on bonds is extremely negative.

Over the years, the official measure of inflation has been altered in two ways. One is the introduction of substitution for what formerly was a constant weighted basket of goods. In the former measure, if a price of an item in the basket (index) rose, the CPI rose by the weight of that item in the basket.

In the substitution-based measure, if a price of an item in the basket goes up, the item is removed from the basket, and a cheaper item is put in its place. For example, if the price of New York strip steak rises, the new CPI will substitute the price of a cheaper cut.

In this new measure, inflation is held down by measuring not a fixed standard of living but a declining standard of living.

The other adjustment used to restrain the measure of inflation is to re-classify many price rises as “quality improvements.” Price rises declared to be quality improvements do not translate into a higher measure of inflation. In other words, if a product rises in price, the price increase or some portion of it can be assigned to improved quality, not to a rise in component or energy costs. As the incentive is to hold down the inflation measure in order to save money for the government on Social Security cost-of-living-adjustments, quality improvements are overestimated.

Consumers have to pay the higher prices. Except for the 1 percent, incomes are not growing; so higher product prices, regardless of whether they are quality improvements, mean a lower standard of living for the 99 percent.

The understated new measure of inflation allows the government to show real gross domestic product growth and, thus, the end of the December 2007 recession. It also allows the government to show in the latest report real retail sales again matching the pre-recession level. However, when measured correctly, as by Williams, the true picture of retail sales shows a steep decline from 2007 through 2009 and bottom bouncing since.

The reason real retail sales cannot recover is that real average weekly earnings continues its downward path. Earlier in this new century, the lack of income growth for the bulk of the U.S. population was masked by a rise in consumer debt. Americans borrowed to spend, and this kept the economy going until the point was reached that consumers had more debt than they could service.

Williams’ report of real average weekly earnings shows that Americans are taking home less purchasing power than they did in the 1960s and 1970s.

Reflecting the dollar’s loss of purchasing power, the price of gold and silver in dollars has risen dramatically during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama regimes.

For the past year or two, the Federal Reserve and its dependent banks have operated to cap the price of gold at about $1,750. They do this by selling naked shorts in the paper speculative gold market.

There are two gold markets. One is a market for physical possession by individuals and central banks. The rising demand in the physical bullion market points to a rising price for gold.

The other market is the speculative paper market, in which financial institutions bet on the future gold price. By placing large amounts of shorts, this market can be used to suppress price rises in the physical market. The Federal Reserve, which can print money without limit, can cover any losses on its agents’ paper contracts.

It is important to the Federal Reserve’s low interest rate policy to suppress the bullion price. If the prices of gold and silver continue to rise relative to the U.S. dollar, the Fed cannot keep the prices of bonds high and interest rates low. If the dollar is widely perceived to be declining in value in relation to gold, the price of dollar-denominated assets will also decline, including bonds. If the dollar loses value, the Fed loses control over interest rates, and the U.S. financial bubble pops, with hell to pay.

To forestall Armageddon, the Fed and its dependent banks cap the price of gold.

The Fed’s fix is temporary; and as the Fed continues to create ever more dollars, the price of gold will eventually escape the Fed’s control, as will interest rates and inflation.

The Fed has produced a perfect storm that could consume the United States and perhaps the entire Western world.

Unemployment Data Lies

We do not believe government numbers and in the following post by Paul Craig Roberts,  we being to understand why. He shows us how we really have Great Depression  unemployment numbers. Why is our government lying to us?  We blame the education system and the media and our lack of ability to think.

Our educators have not trained us to think, to divine,  and to pull together seemingly unrelated pieces of information. This ability to make up your own mind based on discovering data is not something that comes naturally, it must be learned. In schools, we do not work on readin' and 'writin, we work on feelings, cooperation and not recitation. A democracy, or in our case a  republic, cannot continue to exist with an uninformed, illiterate populace.

In times past, the news media  would go out and "dig up the skeletons". They would  discover the news behind the news. However in today's world, where all news is entertainment, spending dollars on reporters running around the country is expensive.  
Money can be spent on several sensational projects that will get the same viewership.  On top of that, the news media has forgotten that its role is to present both sides of the story and instead has become a promoter of the Democratic party and its mission.

So when you add up a country that is poorly educated and a news media that presents only one side of the story, is it any wonder that the government can come up with phony numbers and the lap dog press spews this drivel as if it was real.  

In the eyes of the press, there is no "story" here.  Numbers are boring and parsing the difference between U.3, U.6 and SGS would not make exciting entertainment. Yet that is where the real truth lies. If we still used the numbers of the 30's we would have nearly 23% unemployment. The difference is that in the 30's there was no unemployment compensation, social security, social security disability or welfare.  Today, we don't see the unemployed lining up for food or jobs, it is all done by computer. That is not sexy news and so the news media says "Ho Hum" and moves onto the latest story about the celeb who gets arrested for whatever.

So the government feeds us the slop and we eat it up. What else are they misleading us on? Who knows but if one expects the truth from government, we still have that bridge for sale in Arizona.

Conservative Tom

More Phony Employment Numbers

December 11, 2012 by Paul Craig Roberts 

PHOTOS.COM

Statistician John Williams (shadowstats.com) calls the government’s latest jobs and unemployment reports “nonsense numbers.”

There are a number of ongoing problems with the released numbers. For example, the concurrent-seasonal factor adjustments are unstable. The birth-death model adds non-existent jobs each month that are then taken out in the annual downward benchmark revisions. Williams calculates that the job overstatement through November averages 45,000 monthly. In other words, employment gains during 2012 have been overstated by about 500,000 jobs. Another problem is that each month’s jobs number is boosted by downside revision of the previous month’s jobs number. Williams reports that the 146,000 new jobs reported for November “was after a significant downside revision to October’s reporting. Net of prior-period revisions, November’s seasonally-adjusted monthly gain was 97,000.”

Even if we believe the government that 146,000 new jobs materialized during November, that is the amount necessary to stay even with population growth and therefore could not be responsible for reducing the unemployment rate from 7.9 percent to 7.7 percent. The reduction is due to how the unemployed are counted.

The 7.7 percent rate is known as the “headline rate.” It is the rate you hear in the news. Its official designation is U.3.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has another official unemployment rate known as U.6.
The difference is that U.3 does not include discouraged workers who are not currently actively seeking a job. (A discouraged worker is a person who has given up looking for a job because there are no jobs to be found.) The U.6 measure includes workers who have been discouraged for less than one year. The U.6 rate of unemployment is 14.4 percent, about double the headline rate.

The U.6 rate does not include long-term discouraged workers, those who have been discouraged for more than one year. John Williams estimates this rate and reports the actual rate of unemployment (known as SGS) in November to be 22.9 percent.

In other words, the headline rate of unemployment is one-third the actual rate.

The drop in the November headline rate of unemployment from 7.9 percent to 7.7 percent is due to a 20.4 percent increase in the number of short-term discouraged workers in November. In other words, unemployed people rolled out of the U.3 measure into the U.6 measure.
Similarly, a number of short-term discouraged workers roll out of the U.6 measure into Williams’ measure that includes all of the unemployed. Williams reports that “with the continual rollover, the flow of headline workers continues into the short-term discouraged workers (U.6), and from U.6 into long term discouraged worker status (a ShadowStats.com measure), at what has been an accelerating pace. The aggregate November data show an increasing rate of individuals dropping out of the headline (U.3) labor force.” In other words, the headline rate of unemployment can drop even though the unemployed are having a harder time finding jobs.

The U.S. government simply lowers the unemployment rate by not counting all of the unemployed. We owe this innovation to the Administration of Bill Clinton. In 1994, the Clinton Administration redefined “discouraged workers” and limited this group to those who are discouraged for less than one year. Those discouraged for more than one year are no longer considered to be in the labor force and ceased to be counted as unemployed.

If the U.S. government will mislead the public about unemployment, it will also
mislead about Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Russia, China and 9/11. The government fits its story to its agenda.

A government that wants to cut the social safety net doesn’t want you to know that the unemployment rate is 22.9 percent. A government that wants to cut the social safety net when between one-fifth and one-fourth of the workforce is out of work looks hard-hearted, mean-spirited and foolish. But if the government reports only one-third of the unemployed and presents that rate as falling, then the government can present its cuts as prudent to avoid falling over a “fiscal cliff.”

If the “free and democratic” Americans cannot even find out what the unemployment rate is, how do they expect to find out about anything?

–Paul Craig Roberts