The following are three sets of employment data released by the Government for January:

1.  The economy lost 20,000 jobs

2.  Weekly first-time unemployment claims were high (consistent with net job losses) and rising.  See chart:



3.  The Unemployment Rate fell from 10.0% in December to 9.7% in January


There are only a few possibilities which explain these disparate trends:

• Errors within the Department of Labor’s surveying results
• A flaw in the methodology used to calculate the Unemployment Rate
• Overt manipulation of the data

Overt manipulation may not be proven based on an analysis of released data.  I do note that:

• The Government does not count out of work Americans who have become discouraged and quit looking for a job as “Unemployed”.  As such, the greater the number of people who quit looking for work the more the Unemployment Rate improves.

• According to a revision in today’s report, from March 2008 to April 2009 1.2 million more jobs were lost than had been previously reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  This may be the largest such revision in U.S. history.  The error is extraordinary and it is difficult to believe that it results solely from incompetence alone.

An interesting observation:  The U.S. economy has lost 3.3 million jobs since the Stimulus Spending Bill was implemented at a deficit-financed cost of $787 billion.