Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,
This week brought forward more evidence that we are living in a fabricated world. The popular storyline presents a world of pure awesomeness. The common experience, however, grossly falls short.
On Tuesday, for example, the Labor Department reported there were a record 6.6 million job openings in March. Based on the Labor Department’s data, there were enough jobs available – exactly – for the 6.6 million Americans who were actively looking for a job. What a remarkable feat!
In fact, this is the first time there’s been a job opening for every unemployed person since the Labor Department began keeping track of job openings nearly 20 years ago. Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank, took one look at the jobs and labor report and exclaimed: “The labor market is literally on fire it is so hot with job openings!”
Now, obviously, not every person is qualified for every job. A person’s skills often don’t match up with those required for a certain job. This may be why the unemployment rate’s 3.9 percent, not 0.0 percent.
Still, doesn’t the perfect harmony of a precise 1:1 ratio of job openings to unemployed persons strike you as being contrived? Well, that’s because it is.
This statistic, like many of the official numbers, is fake. It’s a fabrication. And it doesn’t stand up to the empirical first-hand experience of broad cross-sections of the population.
Fabrications
Is the labor market really so hot with job openings that it’s literally on fire? The Labor Department’s fake numbers say so. Nonetheless, let’s cross check their accuracy.
To clarify, there are various ways to reduce the unemployment rate. There are hard ways. And there are easy ways. Reducing the unemployment rate by increasing the number of people that are working is hard. It take time, hard work, and discipline. Moreover, it takes strong economic growth.
But no one likes time, hard work, and discipline. Instead, everyone likes the opposite. Everyone likes instant gratification, lethargy, and flexibility – especially government statisticians.
Hence, the quicker, easier, and simpler way to reduce the unemployment rate is to stop counting some of the people that fall in the unemployed category. Make them, in effect, disappear. Problem solved! Here, Erik Sherman, writing for Forbes, explains how the fiction is written:
“The number of jobs increased by 164,000 in April. But the number of unemployed dropped by 239,000 between March and April.
“That is why the employment-population ratio — the percentage of all people of working age (16 and up, including people who have stopped looking for work) that are employed — dropped from 60.4 percent to 60.3 percent. More people disappeared from the labor rolls.”
This is how statistics are conveniently fudged and fabricated. Of course, the disappeared unemployed didn’t actually vanish from the face of...