About Those Good Jobs Numbers . . .

Fake But Accurate?

A few days ago, the last months unemployment numbers came out, and that the economy gained 284,000 jobs and the unemployment rate declined to 5.9%, the lowest ever in the Obama era (not that high a bar).  We know about the problem with the long term unemployed dropping out of the job market, and deflating unemployment numbers, but how good are the actual data?

Denver Census Bureau Supervisors Says Unemployment Numbers Are Being Faked…

A field supervisor in the Census Bureau’s Denver region has informed her organization’s higher-ups, the head of the Commerce Department and congressional investigators that she believes economic data collected by her office is being falsified.

And this whistleblower — who asked that I not identify her — said her bosses in Denver ignored her warnings even after she provided details of wrongdoing by three different survey takers. The three continued to collect data even after she reported them.

When I spoke with this whistleblower earlier this year as part of my investigation of Census, she told me that hundreds of interviews that go into the Labor Department’s unemployment rate and inflation surveys would miraculously be completed just hours before deadline. The implication was that someone with the ability to fill in the blanks on incomplete surveys was doing just that.

The Denver whistleblower also provided to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform the names of other Census workers who can spill the beans about data fraud in other regions.

Census is broken up into six regions. Cheating has already been proven in the Philadelphia region. And with this whistleblower’s letter, Census authorities now have allegations that the same kind of nonsense was going on in Denver — that office covers Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.

Assuming this is true, I guess the question is whether "lower ranking people in Cincinnati Denver" are simply making up numbers to make it seem like they are doing the hard work of actually collecting real data, in which case it could be either favorably or unfavorably biased (I know what my guess would be), or whether the orders have come down from on high within the Bureau to "fix the damn numbers" before the election.

Found at  Wombat-socho's "In the Malbox: 10.8.14", who got it from Weasel Zippers, who got it from the NY Post.  You can be reasonably sure it won't be on CBS or in the New York Times any time soon.