Statistical Ninjitsu

I have long wondered that myself. How does it work that we lose MORE jobs, yet the unemployment rate goes down?

And here's the problem, be it health care, the deficit, name ANY area of government that has a budget, or projects statistics (which covers them all) and the White House can simply "name" a number and call it legitimate with a straight face. The OMB is their "numbers arm" if you will. That's why the CBO is "supposed" to be the gold standard when it comes to determining cost of any given program. One might recall the disparate cost of healthcare's final price tag between the OMB & the CBO.

Now back to the Labor Department ... they released this "drop." The problem is that the drop isn't necessarily in unemployment, but rather jobless benefit claims. People that simply don't sign up for unemployment benefits once fired (or just haven't yet), or have exercised their max & kicked off, stopped looking for work all together thus don't qualify, etc, name your reason, are NOT counted in the supposed "unemployment rate." A rate that is more accurately described as the "jobless benefit rate." So, we can have an increase in jobs lost in a given month, we can even average more lost than gained, but if for any reason there are less people, say 1/10th of 1%, filing jobless benefit CLAIMS then, with a straight face, the Department of Labor announces a "drop" in unemployment.

DC would make Tony Soprano blush with the level of concocted schemes of which they are capable. And they don't even have a catchy theme song ...