January Unemployment -- Is this real?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released the January jobs report this morning; it was very good. Unemployment is now at 8.3% and 243,000 new jobs were created. It sounds wonderful.

Then I read the report and not just the headlines. January is also the month when the government adjusts all the figures for the prior year in order to come up with a new baseline. In each of the last five years, the January report explained that the actual number of jobs had been overstated in the previous reports; the average amount of overstatement has been about 400,000 jobs. Today, however, the BLS reported that prior reports actually understated the number of jobs by about a quarter of a million. Those prior reports also overstated participation in the workforce by about 0.3%. Somehow, the prior reports also used the wrong information on exactly who is in the workforce, even missing substantially on the number of men vs. the number of women. When you put it all together, the conclusion is that the unemployment rate was actually .2% lower than had been reported.

Let's translate this into English. The government is telling us this morning that without the changes it has now made to the calculations, unemployment would be 8.5% not 8.3%. It is also telling us that last year the error in the surveys all went in the opposite direction from what had been seen in every year for the previous five. I can only wonder if the fact that this is an election year made a difference. I would like to believe that the figures are honest and that the employment picture is actually starting to improve. Unfortunately, I have seen too many lies from the Obamacrats not to wonder about the validity of this report.