Say, did ya see that jobs report? Impossibly good, eh? Wait...what??

Hey citizen!  Didja hear the GREAT news about the job report for July?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) the U.S. economy created an astonishing 528,000 jobs last month!  

Wow!  The 70-odd economists surveyed before the announcement had predicted the number to be 250,000, which is just barely above the number needed to keep up with population growth.  So if true the numbers would mean the economy beat expectations by so much more than anyone could have imagined!

So with job creation like that, we can't possibly be in a recession, eh?  I mean, those are off-the-charts numbers!  In fact the stats say this kind of growth is so astonishingly higher than expected that it would only be expected to happen once in 20,000 years!

Say, that's...that's...really...really amazing.  And coming at a time when orders are down and costs are up (possibly moving nervous companies to lay off employees), it's a bit...um...  Let's just say the bullshit alarms are going off like crazy.

So let me put ya some knowledge about the jobs report and lets see if we can get to the bottom of this:

The BLS actually compiles TWO jobs reports:  One, called the Establishment Survey, asks a sample of businesses how many jobs each has added in the previous month.  The other, called the Household Survey, asks a random sample of households whether anyone in that household got hired or layed off.  Usually the two surveys agree quite closely, which is the point of having both: each acts to confirm or contradict the other.

The Establishment survey is the one that showed 528,000 jobs added.  In stunning contrast, the Household survey showed a growth of just 179,000 jobs--not enough to keep up with population growth.

Gosh, that's a pretty staggering difference, eh?  Is it rare for one survey to report almost THREE TIMES more jobs created than the other?  And if that's unusual, did a single reporter bother to ask WHY that happened--what could have caused it?

Okay, for the first question: take a look at the graph below:

Now notice two things:  First, look how closely the two surveys agreed--at least through March of this year.  But then, mysteriously, suddenly, they started to diverge--a trend that has gotten worse for four months in a row: While the Establishment survey continued to climb, the Household survey went flat.

Certainly it's possible for a low-level employee to key in a wrong number and cause one month to be way off.  But the Household survey has stayed flat for four months in a row, which eliminates the possibility of a one-time error.  But if that's out, what could be causing the growing divergence between the two surveys--which now differ by 1.8 MILLION jobs?

Think about it: randomly-selected household members would have no incentive to lie, and even if a handful did, it wouldn't be enough to skew the results measurably.  Not only that, any plot would have to know who the BLS was going to call, and invite them to help in the plot for four months running.  Astronomically unlikely.

But by the same reasoning, what incentive would businesses have to overstate the number of jobs they created?  Except for specialized minority-hiring incentives, businesses aren't rewarded or penalized for their job-creation results, so where's the incentive?

I suspect the explanation will turn out to be that most U.S. companies saw the economic slowdown coming when the price of oil started going exponential last November.  By the time it hit $100 per barrel in March, most companies had started laying off employees, which is what the Household survey shows.  

But after the first-quarter GDP shrank, with the midterm elections coming up the biden crew was determined NOT to let figures out that would suggest a continued problem in Q2, since that would signal a recession.  So even though it seems impossible, I think they simply cooked the figures of the Establishment survey to keep the same rate of job growth shown from December to March.

And sure enough, the Mainstream Media has already reported that it's just not possible that we're in a recession because the job growth was so faaaabulous!  And since most Americans believe what they see and read in the Media, the lie seems to be working.

If that sounds far-fetched, and anyone has a plausible alternative that accounts for the flatness of the Household survey for four months now, I'd love to hear it.  

Meanwhile it would be fabulous if Judicial Watch or the Republican National Committee would file a FOIA request for all the data from the Establishment survey from April thru July of this year, and would call a few dozen of the surveyed firms to see if the figures on the BLS sheets agree with the companies.

Source.