When the BLS is changing the way it calculates these numbers month to month, how can one possibly trust the unemployment number? That’s what Obama hopes the 99% ignores. Of course, it you use the BLS methods to calculate it, the 99% becomes the 1%.
The problem for Obama is that we should be creating over 500,000 jobs on a monthly basis and 4 to 5 percent growth in GDP this far into recovery and we are not...We are going to go into another recessision soon.
Today in a Bloomberg report on the UE rate at the very end of the article, the government’s ‘new methodologies’ and other attempts at screwing with the numbers were disclosed:
With today’s jobs report, the government issued its annual benchmark update, aligning the data with corporate tax records covering the period from April 2010 to March 2011. The Labor Department added 165,000 to the job count over the period.
The report also included methodology changes to the household survey, incorporating new population data from the decennial census, according to the Labor Department.
It also included changes to the figures used to adjust the data for seasonal swings affecting numbers back to January 2007.