No three-ring circus needed to rig unemployment rate

New York Post ^ | 05/08/2014 | John Crudele

[SeekAndFind]

Not only can the nation’s unemployment rate be manipulated, it is easy to do. And it wouldn’t take a team of conspirators, as a federal investigator alleged, to accomplish that feat.

In its report last week, the Commerce Department Inspector General’s office said it found no attempt to manipulate the unemployment statistics during the last presidential election, when the jobless rate suddenly fell sharply.

The IG’s most important point: the jobless rate couldn’t be rigged even if someone wanted to because too many people would have to be involved.

Let me give you the exact statement from the report:

“Addressing allegation raised in the media (that would be me, folks) we found no evidence that the national unemployment rate was manipulated by staff in the Philadelphia regional office in the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election.”

“To accomplish this, our analysis concluded that it would have taken 78 Census Bureau field representatives working together, in a coordinated way, to report each and every unemployed person included in the sample as ‘employed’ or ‘not in the labor force’ during Sept. 2012.”

A field rep goes to peoples’ houses and asks them questions. One of them, Julius Buckmon, got caught filling out hundreds of fake reports in the Philadelphia region in 2010 and 2011. That fact was hidden by Census until I started reporting about it last November.

Buckmon told Census back then — and he repeated it to the IG — that one of his bosses told him to cheat and he’d be covered if he got caught. Sources of mine — you would call them whistleblowers — say this sort of cheating is rampant.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Why go through all that bother when they can just lie?

[txrefugee]

This rotten bunch of government bureaucrats can be found in every agency. Just look at how they lied about medical care for our veterans. That’s about as low as one can get….unless it’s paying big bonuses from taxpayers’ dwindling paychecks to the employee who spent 2-6 hours on porn sites every day.

[TomGuy]

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

[attributed to British PM Benjamin Disraeli]

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Numbers are easy to manipulate. It doesn’t take much, either. Add some here, deduct some there, move some around, mix things up with percents vs numbers, etc.

That is why some real ‘journalists’ and commentators look at the fine print and footnotes in documents.

[tbw2]

One high up manager changes the definition of “unemployed”. Everyone follows the new definition. There is no conspiracy except by the leadership that said you aren’t unemployed if you moved to SSDI, haven’t looked for over a year or had 99 weeks of unemployment stop.

That’s a management decision, and the NYT can say there isn’t a conspiracy by employees. They aren’t lying, just collecting stats differently.

But we know the Obama administration does this regularly. For example, they changed their definition of insured during the Obamacare rollout/sign-up period to muddy the definition, so that there isn’t a clear change before and after roll-out of how insured rates changed.