Yes, the BLS is now producing such a steaming pile of waste matter that it might as well be made an arm of the DNC. Or in the alternative, some of the billions that US taxpayers have wasted on it over the years might be recouped from a sale to CNBC. After all, bubblevision’s monthly cheerleading session couldn’t do without it.
In any event, once again this month the labor department bureaucrats did not go out and actually count 242,000 new jobs or even extrapolate them from a valid, scientific sample survey of the Gallup variety.
Folks, they never left their cushy offices; they plucked these numbers from a computer model!
Even before the Census Bureau turned over to the BLS its ragged February data sheets from calling households which do not have phones and surveying businesses which may or may not exist, they more or less knew this month’s numbers.
How? Why they are just fitting a projection line to the trend of the last several years, and then gussying up the resulting hockey sticks with even flakier seasonal maladjustments, re-estimates, birth/death factors and a lot more statistical shenanigans.
This post was published at David Stockmans Contra Corner on March 5, 2016.
Recent Comments