AFter we raised holy hell on Friday the BLS in the night Saturday they admitted that the unemployment rate is edging up to 20%. Even higher then the great depression
When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May. But that would still be an improvement from an unemployment rate of about 19.7 percent for April, applying the same standards. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs reports, said it was working to fix the problem. “BLS and the Census Bureau are investigating why this misclassification error continues to occur and are taking additional steps to address the issue,” said a note at the bottom of the Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
Some took this as a sign that President Donald Trump or one of his staffers may have tinkered with the data to make it look better, especially since most forecasters predicted the unemployment rate would be close to 20 percent in May, up from 14.7 percent in April.
The unemployment rate comes from a survey where Census workers ask about 60,000 households questions about whether they are working or looking for a job the week of May 10 to 16. One of the first questions that gets asked is did the person do any work “for pay or profit?” There are then 45 pages of follow up questions that come after that. One of those questions asks if someone was “temporarily absent” from the job and why that absence occurred. One of the responses is “other.” The BLS instructed surveyors to try to figure out if someone was absent because of the pandemic and, if so, to classify them as on “temporary layoff,” meaning they would count in the unemployment data. Some people continued to insist they were just “absent” from work during the pandemic, and the BLS has a policy of not changing people’s answers once they are recorded. It’s how the BLS protects against bias or data manipulation.
Former staffers said it’s unusual that the BLS was not able to correct this problem faster.
“It’s surprising the BLS couldn’t come up with fixes to make this work in May,” said Erica Groshen, the former BLS commissioner under Obama.
Many economists wish people would focus on the fact that 21 million Americans are currently unemployed and over 2 million have permanently lost their jobs.
The situation remains dire, they say, even after a few jobs returned in May as the economy reopened. Nick Note: Despite the incredible spin and out and out fraudulent reports the facts are the facts and the economy is NOT NOT recovering. And i expect a second wave to send these people right back their sofas watching Netfelx.