Free Republic

Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics said the economy added 209,000 jobs in July; the number of employed people jumped by 345,000 to 153,513,000 in July, setting a third straight monthly record; the number of Americans counted as not in the labor force, meaning they don't have a job and are not looking for one, dropped for a third straight month to 94,657,000; and the nation's unemployment rate also dropped a tenth of a point, to 4.3 percent. The labor force participation rate.. was 62.9 percent in July, slightly better than it has been in recent months, but still close...

Back when Hong Kong was a largely autonomous colony of Great Britain, its leaders made a point to not calculate the city-state’s economic statistics. With good reason. The feeling was that if government were in the business of divining unemployment, GDP, and other supposed measures of economic activity, that those same measures would be used by politicians as an excuse for politicians to ‘do something.’ Of course, when it comes to economic growth and progress, there’s no need for politicians to do anything other than ensure individual freedom to succeed, fail, import, export, and to generally produce in order to...

The BLS has announced that as a result of the Labor Day weekend, 9 states (among which the biggest one California) did not report initial claims data to the bean counters, so instead the government had to "estimate" what the data would have been: yep, estimate, what the data was in these nine states. Official data is now made up on the fly. This US economic data reporting has just entered the twilight zone. Also, when the data is officially made up, it is not that difficult to get data that is "better than expected." The full list of states...

The "sudden" drop in unemployment rates is simple labor department lying propaganda. It doesn't take a genius to add up the lies either. During this last December when there is normally an uptick in seasonal employement for the Christmas season there were still 85,000 more lay offs than new jobs (BLS stats). Then there is a NEW and recent revision of the jobs numbers to say they made a "mistake" in their calculations and there were almost a MILLION more lost jobs than they thought when the unemployment rate was 10%? Oh, and my favorite, this month there is a...

Why do the republicans allow the democrats to continue to distort and misrepresent the the employment figures ? Let's look at the simple facts. President Bush's first budget was not enacted until November of 2001. Until that point we were operating under a Clinton budget. Yet, we allow the democrats to hang their hat on the distortional claim of "since Bush took office". Here are the real statistics:

Where do the statistics come from? Early each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor announces the total number of employed and unemployed persons in the United States for the previous month, along with many characteristics of such persons. These figures, particularly the unemployment rate--which tells you the percent of the labor force that is unemployed--receive wide coverage in the press, on radio, and on television. Some people think that to get these figures on unemployment the Government uses the number of persons filing claims for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits under State or Federal...