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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GROUND ZERO™ who wrote (742353)	6/11/2006 10:20:49 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

"That's how the numbers are tabulated." That's how the numbers are tabulated NOW you mean. :-) Same as the even more HEAVILY manipulated and corrupted CPI figures, both (BLS 'employment' estimate & CPI figure) are RUBBER YARDSTICKS. The government changes them whenever they need to keep the numbers down. It would take a BOOK just to describe the changes over JUST the past 15 years or so.... This has been going on for decades --- but increasingly, more and more in recent years. Obviously (because so many wage contracts include CPI automatic adjustments, Social Security and Medicaid and other government entitlement programs --- NOT TO MENTION THE IRS AND 'BRACKET CREEP'!) all increase outlays based upon these 'official' statistical series. The government 'saves' hundreds of BILLIONS of DOLLARS by manipulating these numbers downward... in effect a 'stealth' tax increase (or at least, keeping taxes high and unchanged except for an upward bias... while cutting outlays to citizens by reneging on promises made to them). So... I wouldn't recommend using the 'rubber yardstick' government employment numbers to argue the case that 'employment if fuller now then at all times previous'... AT LEAST without first backing out all the changes of recent years to how the statistical series is calculated, to assure that, when comparing today to the past, you are comparing apples to apples... not apples to oranges. The percent of the total population that is employed has declined... that alone should tell us something. (But even that one figure needs to be examined in light of demographic changes --- the percent of working age citizens for example --- before we can draw any 'hard and fast' conclusions.)