Trump May Not Have Tampered With The Unemployment Numbers, But He Knew They Were False When He Hyped Them To The Media-- Which Also Knew They Were False

by Richard Serra

Trump celebrated like a pig in shit yesterday because it looked-- for a minute-- that the unemployment numbers had come down. They didn't-- and he knew it. But he blared about it like a madman anyway. And the stock market took off like a rocket-- up over 800 points and the mainstream media went right along with the ruse for 24 hours. Today, the Washington Post Heather Long explained what happened last night. It was the :labor Department's official jobs report for May and "it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major 'error' indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate"-- an unemployment number over 16% for May, for more dire... and not a reason for a Trumpanzee celebrity gaslighting of the entire country.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is working on fixing the problems and investigating if Trump was able to tinker with the data to make it look better. "Economists," wrote Long, "say the BLS was trying to be as transparent as possible about how hard it is to collect real-time data during a pandemic. The BLS admitted that some people who should have been classified as "temporarily unemployed" during the shutdown were instead misclassified as employed but "absent" from work for "other reasons," a category indicating they were on vacation, on jury duty or on child care leave-- reasons where the worker decides to leave... different from a pandemic.

CNBC reported that the 13.3% rate, "while still high relative to any point since the Great Depression... likely understates the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic" and that "the real unemployment rate is likely at least 16%, according to the federal government. That would mean roughly 1 in 6 people can’t find work... The overall unemployment rate would have been 'about 3 percentage points higher than reported' if those individuals had been identified correctly, according to the agency. (The estimate isn’t seasonally adjusted.) That would put the official unemployment rate at 16.3%. The true rate could be higher still.

The unemployment rate doesn’t include the share of workers who may have dropped out of the workforce, perhaps due to feeling pessimistic about the chances of finding a job in the current economy. More than 6 million workers have dropped out of the labor force since February.

In fact, the unemployment rate is a much-higher 21.2% as judged by another metric.

This metric, which the BLS calls U-6, includes people “marginally attached to the labor force.” These are people who aren’t currently working or looking for work but are available for work, as well as part-time employees who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for part-time employment.

The U-6 metric doesn’t include the workers misclassified by the agency.

Of course, furloughed workers could be recalled back to work quickly, depending on the speed of the economic rebound as states begin to reopen certain business sectors. The unemployment rate would likely rebound faster in this eventuality than if the layoffs were permanent.

The same misclassification phenomenon occurred in April, too-- the official 14.7% unemployment rate would have been nearly 20% if furloughed workers had been identified correctly, the BLS said.

“BLS and the Census Bureau are investigating why this misclassification error continues to occur and are taking additional steps to address the issue,” the agency said Friday in the jobs report.

“According to usual practice, the data from the household survey are accepted as recorded,” the agency said. “To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are taken to reclassify survey responses.”

And Trump's deceitful twitter barrage is out there-- incorrect and uncorrected. By the time CBS News ran this deceitful propaganda last night, they already knew it wasn't true and was designed to mislead the public: