Unemployment rate in USA drops below 8%? I am calling bull on this...

[mrstickball]

binary solo said:

ECM said:

richardhutnik said:
I am not saying that this is some evil Obama plot doing it, just that the measures to me seem pretty much broken.

This has been a problem for a lot longer than Obama, and there are no signs it'll be fixed, since it's always going to benefit one party when it's 'their turn', so there's no incentive to actually do anything about it. (And as long as there's 'play' in the numbers, they're going to be massaged extra carefully, especially during a presidential election year.)

So what you're saying is that the Bureau of Labour Statistics deliberately massages these numbers in an election year to make the president look good? Is corruption in the USA really that deep? If so why bother even going through the sham of having elections?

Is the Bureau, like everything else in the US govt, staffed by political appointees at the senior levels? This would mean in every presidential election year the stats put out by the bureau will favour the president of the day.

Its really not that the BLS massaged the numbers for Obama, but the fact that they've massaged the numbers for decades. I believe it was in the 1960's that we adjusted how we calculate unemployment, because the government thought it was too high.

Gallup's underemployment, the BLS U-6 number, as well as labor participation rates are usually the best three metrics to use, as they provide a very broad-based approach to employment. Having said that, all three are generally bad, and not recovering very quickly.