When do good job numbers, become too good to be true?

[Thomas Hurt]

How do we know Trump admin isn't padding the results?

[dalton99a]

1. Excellent point, now that we're living under a dictator.

[Chin music]

2. When everyone reading the report is checking the

Want Ads for jobs, and that's why they even read the jobs story to begin with? Everythings the greatest ever? Why do Americans feel left out economically then? When you lie about one thing, all the rest is suspect at best. And this guy lies alllll the time.
2 big lies.
1. Best economy ever.
2. Voting is tallied correctly.

[unblock]

3. welllllll,

at this point it's still pretty hard to fake these numbers. too many people involved in too many parts putting the numbers together, and they're not fully purge and replaced everyone with trumpists... yet.

moreover, they're trying to convince the fed to lower rates. it's hard to do that when the economy is looking great.

if they were really in a position to lie about the numbers, they'd play a longer game and make it so the economy was really improving the summer before the election. so they wouldn't be overplaying thing now.


that said, i don't doubt that they are most willing to lie about such things and probably will later in the campaign.

[Chin music]

5. It's sort of a

white wash lie bc they just choose not to figure in a few variables in the equation, like people who have given up on finding full-time, middle-class work, and what kinds of jobs these are. Part-time jobs are mis-leading. Just my angle on it though. You make a good point.

[unblock]

10. yeah, you kinda have to be a bit of an economist to really understand the numbers.

you're right, "the" unemployment rate only looks at people who have (at least) one job as a percentage of people in the job market. it ignores people who "retired" earlier than they would have liked, or who became students to escape a frustrating job market, or who are getting paid much less than previous jobs, or who are working three lousy jobs because they can't find one good one, etc.

and it ignores regional and industry variation and so on.

you really have to dig into all the employment numbers to get a better sense of what's going on.


as always in the economy of late, much of the gains are really going only to relatively few. the big story of the economy of late is the concentrated distribution of wealth and income.

so people have jobs, but not great ones, and those who have jobs already are still not often in a great position to get the raises that one might expect when there's a super low unemployment rate.

[Chin music]

13. +1

Thanks for the info.

[StarfishSaver]

18. I wrote my post before seeing your excellent response!

[Kurt V.]

4. here is dean baker noting an irregularity:

Dean Baker
@DeanBaker13
#JobsDay Over the last year black unemployment rate is up 0.2 pp to 6.7%, white unemployment rate down 0.4 pp to 3.1%. This goes against usual pattern towards convergence with low unemployment

[Poiuyt]

6. I'm sure the numbers are accurate, but miss a key point

Incomes have been stagnating since the late 70s. All the real benefits of the current economy are going to the wealthiest Americans.

[FBaggins]

7. When the reported numbers are inconsistent with the rest of reality

Note that it would be incredibly difficult fake BLS numbers. There are too many career professionals involved who couldn't miss anything substantial and wouldn't keep quiet about it. Plus you can't just report a lower unemployment figure. You would have to actually change tens of thousands of individual surveys (because the internals are also publicly available).

Let imagine that someone was able to do it anyway. We could easily catch them by comparing the government data with state-level and private data.

[Loki Liesmith]

8. Too hard to fake numbers

It’s pretty easy to check for fakery in economic stats. Plus BLS would leak like a sieve if anyone tried.

[marylandblue]

9. There are other statistics gathered by both the government and private sector.

If they were out of whack for more than a month or two, you would hear a lot about it.

[Cairycat]

11. Jobs

and jobs that pay enough to live on, are two different things.

[House of Roberts]

12. When do good job numbers, become too good to be true?

When they are being reached via trillion dollar deficits and artificially low interest rates, that are not needed to reach sustainable growth rates.

[KPN]

14. Well, the GOP and RW talking heads claimed the same under Clinton and Obama so much that

it absolutely must be in their and tRumpee's toolkit for stealing control of government away from the normal people. So, we don't, shouldn't and, yeah, they're likely too good to be true.

[NewJeffCT]

15. were the job numbers fake

when it was 20,000 jobs created in February?

[Mrs. Ted Nancy]

16. Rules have changed in some states

From the AP:

50-year low in jobless claims but not just from few layoffs
By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER
April 11, 2019


WASHINGTON (AP) — The fewest people in nearly 50 years sought unemployment benefits last week, a sign of a strong job market and an unusually low level of layoffs.

Yet the decline in applications for jobless aid isn’t due solely to a tight employment picture. Many states have imposed stricter rules on their unemployment insurance programs — from making it harder to qualify to reducing the duration of benefits to cutting payouts.

The combined effect has been to reduce the number of unemployed people who apply for and receive aid, economists say. Nationwide, just 30% of people out of work now receive unemployment insurance, down from about 40% before the Great Recession.

The historically low level of people seeking aid “tells us we have a strong labor market, and that we’ve made policy changes that mean fewer people can qualify for benefits,” said Martha Gimbel, research director at job listings website Indeed..."

https://www.apnews.com/8facbc0d7b044aca92a61a563028e593

[SWBTATTReg]

21. Good clarification on jobless numbers. Also, inflation numbers are misleading too, being that...

they changed how to track inflation some years back, so I think it's under reported too.

[StarfishSaver]

17. He consistently accused the Obama administration of cooking the books

But this would be difficult to pull off, even for the criminals in the Trump regime. There are too many people - mostly career - involved in the process.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it would be extremely hard to conceal.

[SoCalDem]

19. I've always bristled at these reports

a job at Walmart is a job, but not as valuable as a well-paid tech job at google.. To be a fair report, it needs nuance.. Unemployment benefits only last for a while and then it ends..not necessarily because people got jobs..they just lost their benefits.They are still unemployed, they just stop being counted.

Boomers are retiring at a huge rate and they are not "unemployed" ..

[stillcool]

20. kind of like how you can tell...

who really won an election.

[moondust]

22. Hard to tell.

There may be a lot of "demotivated" boomers calling it quits; that could continue for a few more years. There may be some predatory capitalists massaging the numbers to make the lawless "profits-over-people" administration look good on paper and better their chances of reelection.

[Polly Hennessey]

23. I remain skeptical.