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Forum Post: How the government lies with numbers...

Posted 11 years ago on Feb. 10, 2013, 11:01 a.m. EST by FifeAndDrum (8)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement

According to numbers issued by the Department of Labor, weekly unemployment reports have dropped to a five year low, and the overall employment rate is holding at 7.9%. This would seem to be a vast improvement over the dreadful bloodletting in the system only a few years ago. Has the private Federal Reserve and the Obama Administration really done it? Have they turned back the tide on the greatest fiscal crisis the U.S. has seen since the Depression?

No. They haven’t.

They have only changed how the data is disseminated to the public. In order to understand how the employment statistics con is being engineered, it is important to understand the difference between “Adjusted” and “Unadjusted” numbers.

Labor Department data is “seasonally adjusted”, using a series of statistical assumptions including something called “Trend Cycle Analysis”. Trend Cycle Analysis is, basically, a sham, but a sham put together in a very complex and confusing manner. If you ask a mainstream economist what it is, you’ll likely get a three hour long dissertation filled with financial babble and very little concrete explanation. So let me break it down as simply as I can…

Imagine that you are going to estimate how much profit you plan to make in a particular month, but you don’t just consider your current pay rate and pop it into a calculator; you also throw in the possibility of a few pay raises, an inheritance from a grandma who might kick the bucket, and, your exaggerated expectations of the entire year’s profit on top of that. You may also take into account future bad weather, a mugging, a nuclear war….whatever. All hypothetical situations not based in reality. Basically, you decide that a particular trend in your income is inevitable, then, mold your statistical analysis around that assumption.

When your real profit numbers come in (the unadjusted numbers) and they do not meet your expectations, you simply change them according to what you believe SHOULD have happened. If you insist that your profits are going to go up for the year, and they go down for a couple months instead, you change the variables you use to calculate the statistical average so that the results match your expectations, assuming that it will all balance out in the end.

Now, this sounds utterly insane for the common person out there trying to make a living. If you ran your household this way, without accepting the cold hard unadjusted numbers in front of you, you’d find yourself broke and on the street in no time. Unfortunately this is EXACTLY how our government handles most financial data; by coming to a final conclusion before hand, and then forcing the numbers to fit that conclusion.

This is why in February of 2013, “adjusted” first week unemployment rate was reported at 366,000 – a 5000 person drop from the week before. A seeming improvement in the trend. But, unadjusted numbers came in at 386,176 – a 16,000 person spike from the week before. When one examines real unemployment numbers, he finds that the divergence between the adjusted and unadjusted statistics is growing larger with each passing quarter. That is to say, the contradiction is becoming so blatant between the hard numbers and the Labor Department’s fantasy numbers that one must question whether or not the government is lying to us outright about the state of the economy (hint – they are lying).

These same methods are used by the government to calculate progress in the housing market, disposable income, etc.

More:

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/1326-the-us-economy-is-now-dangerously-detached-from-reality

3 Comments

3 Comments


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[-] 1 points by Oligarchophobe (21) 11 years ago

What about the nonsense we hear about the recession being over in 2009. Such proclamations leave the public out raged. The unemployed and underemployed decide when the recession is over

[-] -1 points by OTP (-203) from Tampa, FL 11 years ago

Injecting trillions into the stock market yearly leads to a centrally planned country.

And we all know who wins with that scenario.

[-] -1 points by Shayneh (-482) 11 years ago

Well if you look at the income revenues that were collected since 2008 that pretty much tells the story

2008 1,927.1 billion 2009 - 1,915.4 billion 2010 - 1,533.1 billion 2011 - 1,751 billion

So what does that tell you - no growth within the private sector - so yes the government does lie.

Here's a link that shows all the figures with relation to government revenues

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/year_revenue_2012USbn_12bs1n#usgs302