“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed
–if all records told the same tale–then the lie passed into
history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the
Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present
controls the past.”…George Orwell, “1984″

Yesterday, February 5, 2010, we reported that the supposed latest unemployment rate is 9.7 %, while at the same time unemployment claims rose again for the last week.

“The unemployment rate dropped from 10 percent because a survey of households found the number of employed Americans rose by 541,000, the Labor Department said Friday. The job losses are calculated from a separate survey of employers.

The department also revised its past employment estimates to show that job losses from the Great Recession have been much worse than previously stated. The economy has shed 8.4 million jobs since the downturn began in December 2007, up from a previous figure of 7.2 million.

That’s the most jobs lost in any recession, as a percent of total employment, since World War II.”

“The Labor Department says unemployment claims rose 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted 480,000 last week. Economists had predicted claims would drop to 460,000.”

“Stock futures weakened Thursday as a rise in weekly jobless claims damped hopes about a key employment report Friday.”
Real unemployment rate?

From Fox News, February 05, 2010

“The Real Story Behind Our Unemployment Numbers”

“A slight improvement in the jobless rate but what is the government hiding about the picture for most of 2009?”

“Most people seem to believe that the number of Americans with jobs is a clearly identifiable number. All you do is count up the number of people with jobs. Unfortunately, that isn’t the way it works. The number reported each month is based on surveys, and surveys have can often have problems. As it turns out, the surveys estimating the number of people with jobs reported over the last couple of years suffered from some really big problems. The economy actually lost about 824,000 more jobs during the recession than we previously thought.
But those adjustments have so far only been made through March 2009, and there are strong reasons to believe that the survey data since then also needs to be adjusted downward.
There are two ways economists measure the number of jobs, the establishment survey that asks about 370,000 employers how many people they are employing and the household survey that asks about 110,000 people each month whether they are working. The establishment survey is often given more weight because about 40 million Americans work for the companies surveyed, a lot more than the 110,000 people interviewed in the other survey. But 110,000 people still make up a huge sample (remember that a big survey for a presidential election might involve 2,000 people), and it is hard to ignore its results. The household survey is also what is used to calculate the unemployment rate.”

“These recent errors are quite large. The error in estimating the number of jobs from April 2008 to March 2009 was 10 times greater than the average error over the preceding eight years. What does this mean in terms of jobs? Normally the government would underestimate the number of new jobs by 80,000 and this time it was overestimating them by about 800,000.”

Read more:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/02/05/john-lott-unemployment-jobs-bureau-labor-statistics-grim/

Do the government numbers “smell right” to you?