Posted on 12/16/2025 8:12:28 AM PST by dangus
There's a lot of economic numbers that don't make sense lately. For one, 2.1 million immigrants and aliens have left the country in the past year; the native-born population has been declining for years now; and yet there are now 2.7 million working-aged people in America than there were a year ago. Another BLS stat shows that the "workforce" has grown by 3 1/4 million workers. That seems like about 5 million workers too many.
If employers are hiring legal workers instead of under the table, those legal workers would be now entering the workforce appearing on any tally of jobs created nor of unemployed workers. And in fact, 2.5 million more native-born workers have jobs than just one year ago, even while unemployment is up 900,000.
But if suddenly the labor market is that much tighter, shouldn't wages be surging? Well, if this was across-the-board, the answer would be yes. And here we see a strange divergence: Average earnings for all workers are only at 3.5% above a year before, down slightly from the year-over-year increase from last month. But average wages for production and non-supervisory are up 3.9%, and that figure is growing. This would be consistent with the labor market tightening for the sort of lower-wage jobs being vacated by illegal aliens, yet slackening for higher-wage jobs.
All of this suggests that the BLS has utterly failed to recognize massive shifts in the workforce. December (the first month after the election) seems to be when everything totally went off the rails. Gee, why would the BLS suddenly massively shift from under-counting workers to dramatically over-counting them the first month after Biden is defeated?
So why aren't American workers feeling this shift? After all, they don't go by official stats, as shown when they became very angry as early as 2004, when statistics like GDP and the stock market said skies were sunny, but voters were experiencing stagnant wages, skyrocketing housing costs and exploding trade deficits. It's very possible that they're really only now feeling the 2024 recession, fed by stats which reinforce perceptions. (Sorry, economists, that was a recession. 3.2 million more unemployed and a shrinking GDP mean a recession to any layperson.)
The good news is that the economy is largely locking in economic growth for 2026, which could help Trump shake off his bad economic approval ratings before the mid-terms. What makes this all the more incredible is that over the past three months, the budget deficit is average $100 billion per month smaller than a year earlier. That's $100 billion less stimulating the economy short-term while harming potential for longer-term growth.
Sure. They can do it once, or maybe twice. Then their reputation is trashed.
And then there are 100 other sources of information to go to. Indeed, all large banks and hedge funds use multiple sources of data, analysis and information
Government stats are propaganda for the plebs.
About 65 years ago I was taught the first time you used uncommon initials or acronyms in a paper you are supposed to state what it means.
I’m sorry, but this is BS:
“This meant that during Trump, millions of native workers took jobs previously held by illegal aliens without this being reported at all by BLS”
Yes, but various interests will all have their own bean counters and the truth will shake out in the comparisons.
And there is always the independent savant with his own website taking names and kicking asses.
Much better than overpaid bureaucrats putting the stamp of authority on their BS prognostications.
The most likely answer is that their methodology is not designed to create accurate, reliable data, but instead is designed to provide data which can be easily manipulated for political purposes.
Many sets of government data are nearly impossible to audit, or compare to other data sets. That's probably by design, not by incompetence.
Care to explain?
In case you didn’t get it: Employment law requires employers to have I-9 forms establishing the ability to legally work. But employers must accept obviously fake identity. (E-Verify allows a way around this for employers who use it: by relying on E-Verify instead of what simply seems fake, employers can weed out fake ID.) This means that when an illegal alien takes a job, that job gets reported to the federal government as being held by a legal worker. So when the illegal alien gets replaced by a legal worker, there is no net increase in employment according to BLS.
On the other hand, when an immigrant or illegal alien who has been counted as unemployed leaves the country, the Census Department has no way of knowing there is now one fewer unemployed person; they just know that they lost contact with someone who had been unemployed and who is not now reporting having gotten a job. Yes, workforce and reasons for not working are from data from the Census Department, not BLS. BLS just uses that data.
Your numbers are seriously inflated. (Sure, DHS has contributed with some inflation of its own.)
The numbers I provide are from the BLS and Census Department. Which of the numbers do you find fault with? I’ll direct you to a source.
We do not know how many are employed. We do not know how many are unemployed.
It is hard for us to admit that we don’t know.
We know “approximately” and we have levels of certainty about what is “approximately”
1) Collection of data is unequal. I knew several friends of each other who were census takers. One friend was much better at finding everyone to be counted and not counting those who should not be counted than the other friend. In another situation the friend was a democrat with the blatant motivation to count “everyone” thus a lot of people were double counted... immigrants who lived in both Mexico and the US depending on the season, people who were away at college, people who owned two homes, people who slept with their girlfriend ocaisionally.
2) Some people want to fly under the radar and do not want to be seen. This includes both criminals, drug dealers and good people who are paranoid. It especially includes people who are trying to stay one step ahead of the repo man.
3) Our Census and BLS procedures are basically based on a 1950s style economy. They do not logically count bit workers, consultants, sub-contractors of sub-contractors and many new types of income that involve a person’s time or talent.
At some point we need to reassess both the decennial census process and the other processes. A major failure of the first Trump administration was that the swamp controlled the 2020 census.
Who will control the 2030 census?
We do not know how many are employed. We do not know how many are unemployed.
It is hard for us to admit that we don’t know.
We know “approximately” and we have levels of certainty about what is “approximately”
1) Collection of data is unequal. I knew several friends of each other who were census takers. One friend was much better at finding everyone to be counted and not counting those who should not be counted than the other friend. In another situation the friend was a democrat with the blatant motivation to count “everyone” thus a lot of people were double counted... immigrants who lived in both Mexico and the US depending on the season, people who were away at college, people who owned two homes, people who slept with their girlfriend ocaisionally.
2) Some people want to fly under the radar and do not want to be seen. This includes both criminals, drug dealers and good people who are paranoid. It especially includes people who are trying to stay one step ahead of the repo man.
3) Our Census and BLS procedures are basically based on a 1950s style economy. They do not logically count bit workers, consultants, sub-contractors of sub-contractors and many new types of income that involve a person’s time or talent.
At some point we need to reassess both the decennial census process and the other processes. A major failure of the first Trump administration was that the swamp controlled the 2020 census.
Who will control the 2030 census?
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