Employment Rate Declines; 20,000 More Lose Job

That headline, taken from one of the major propaganda outlets says it all. Most places just trumpet in their headline "Unemployment drops to 9.7%" To give the former headline some credit, it at least offers the hint of some truth.

Many people do not read more than the headline of a news article. Propagandists know this. So they only include what they want the most people to see and believe in headlines. Oh, and buried in those headlines somewhere is also the fact that the count of people who couldn't find a job for the year 2009 was off by just a little bit. But only by about 1.2 million. No big deal, right? No need for a big headline on that.

So the real question is, how does the unemployment rate decline when there was another net loss of 20,000 jobs? Any free-thinking person with half a brain will come to one of two conclusions. Neither of them very good. Either someone is fudging the numbers, or the way the unemployment rate is calculated is severely flawed. This is a case however where both conclusions are correct. The reasons are numerous of how and where they fudge the numbers (one being already counting temporary census workers as employed even though they aren't) , but no more obvious is this "correction" of 1.2 million more discouraged people than they thought. It's either total incompetence or on purpose. And while I'm quite secure in the knowledge that there are a lot of stupid people out there, even I have a hard time believing incompetence on that scale.