Links about Bush Administration Economic Numbers Not Matching Reality. Note USA Today Readers. This is the post I promised.

• More men not working during Bush years than during Clinton years see post  Clue to the Low Unemloyment Rate? 12% of men in prime work years not working or looking for work

If you don't want to read the post it is based on an New York Times report showing that 12% of men taking a form of early retirement  during the late Bush years.  That is up from c. 6% during the late  Bush years from the percentage of men living similarly during the Clinton years. Recent figures show that men and women are part of the workforce in even numbers, so I used half of that extra 6% to add to the Bush unemployment numbers for the extra men who are not counted in the workforce because they are no longer actively seeking work. On Feb 1, 2008 the BLS announced 4.9% unemployment.  Adding 3% makes 7.9%.  At the bottom of this post I deal with the claim that 1.7% of American women have dropped out of the workforce during the Bush years as compared with the Clinton years.  Halving that number gives us another .85% to add to the unemployment rate which makes the actual unemployment rate for February 2008 8.75% if one wants to compare with Clinton years.

 Also see:

• US Bureau of Labor Statistics Creates Imaginary Jobs 

• Revised Numbers Show that Third Quarter 2006 The Economy Did Worse Than We Were Told. Only 19,000 Jobs Created, not 498,000 as Previously Reported

• US Government Caught Changing the Truth On Another Economic Subject

• Business Week: A Federal Inflation Conspiracy?

RE: above link.  At USA Today, I reported the piece was created in 2005, because I was working from memory.  Apologies.  It was created in 2004.

Excerpt above linked article:

Pimco bond-fund manager Bill Gross has done it again. With his October investment outlook, titled "Haute Con Job," Gross has taken on the government's statisticians and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. He accuses them of purposefully underestimating inflation to make the economy look stronger than it is and keep Uncle Sam's costs artificially low.

... 

According to Gross, the government is "fudging on inflation" by adjusting many of the prices that go into its calculation for improvements in quality (for example, a standard-issue corporate laptop computer has declined in price in the past five years, but it also has a lot more memory and capability overall). Gross also says the feds are adjusting for the fact that if the price of beef goes up, people eat more chicken. Therefore, it doesn't matter so much if a steak costs more. Economists call this phenomenon "substitution bias."

Due to these adjustments, Gross figures inflation is really about a percentage point higher and gross domestic product about a percentage point lower than official statistics. Such an error would have huge ramifications for government payouts due for Social Security or TIPS (inflation-protected bonds). It would also affect bond prices and interest rates. He calls the lower levels of official inflation "a con job foisted on an unwitting public by government officials."

Other economic writers say that people just have to trust government 'adjusters'.  Yeah, as if the Bush administration had not pushed other sources of intelligence to create false numbers before.

But note, that BW says that there does seem to be a gap between the inflation numbers the Bush administration put out and what people were (and still are, I say) experiencing.  Also note that it would also be very advantageous to the Bush administration to fudge high inflation numbers especially if real inflation helped them pay off the tremendous war debts we have, and even more so if the administration could use faked numbers to keep their own costs lower.

•  About 1.7% of women dropping out of labor force during the Bush Administration year:  I've lost the link to the original source. (Yes, I believe it is in one of my posts, but our search engine here is not adequate to find it.) Again I halved that number to reflect women making up half of the workforce before adding it to the unemployment rate.

tags: jobs numbers  economy  jobs  inflation  labor force  

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