More Fake News From Washington

this time it is about employment
The US government continues to lie about everything, not just Russia, Syria, Iran, and China. The US government is incapable of telling the truth about something as straightforward as employment. According to the government, March produced only 98,000 new payroll jobs, an insufficient amount to reduce unemployment, but the unemployment rate fell from 4.7 to 4.5 percent.
How did that happen? Not because the unemployed found jobs. The unemployment rate fell because the government did not count as unemployed large numbers of unemployed people who did not look for a job during the four week period prior to the survey. The US has a low unemployment rate, because the government does not count the unemployed.
The government knows the reported unemployment rate is wrong, because other data are inconsistent with the low rate. For example, the labor force participation rate consistent with a 4.5% unemployment rate is 67%, whereas the current participation rate is a low 63%, which implies a much higher rate of unemployment than 4.5%.

This post was published at Paul Craig Roberts on April 8, 2017.