Truth or CONsequences?

When your government cons you daily with its statistical "facts," it's hard to keep your balance. Conned-sumers are feeling the cognitive disconnect from reality.

May 14, 2024

For years, I’ve been saying it appears the BLS (Bureau of Lying Statistics) publishes fake labor statistics. The numbers always look like the seasonal adjustments are used by each administration to try to make the numbers look better, which means we are operating our country on delusions, not on facts. Ultimately that cannot possibly be as good for the nation as seeing reality as it is and dealing with it together.

Never, however, have the numbers looked so blatantly fake as they have under the Biden administration, and I’ve been pushing that point for months now. Then along came a major mainstream publisher (CNBC) who finally said (first I’d ever heard from the mainstream financial press), “These numbers look rigged.” And now, at last, comes a US congresswoman who tells the head of the BLS she should lose her job if she cannot come up with real numbers, pointing out, as I have for some time now, that it seems a bit too convenient that the numbers always come out initially looking great for her Boss, #NoMoJo Biden, and then get revised down to a more dismal reality later in the year when practically no one is looking … and that this happens EVERY SINGLE MONTH and ALWAYS IN THE SAME DIRECTION!

The fluctuating statistics have finally caught the attention of lawmakers in Congress. Last week, Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., grilled Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su about her Biden-friendly reports.
“I pressed the Biden Administration on why their jobs numbers are consistently wrong and quietly revised downward after they are announced. What is going on at BLS?…”
— Rep. Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) May 3, 2024
“Either you’re putting out fake numbers to give Joe Biden good headlines—and then quietly revising the job numbers down—or the BLS is failing to accurately report the numbers,” Miller said.
Su insisted that the BLS has always revised its jobs reports—which is true, but omits the fact that the lion’s share of Biden jobs reports have been subject to downward revisions, with very few upward revisions taking place. Su then laughed when Miller said, “Never to this level have the numbers been so inaccurate.”
Su’s apparent lack of concern for the inaccurate BLS reports had Miller calling for her job.
“We’ve seen why you can’t remain as secretary,” she said.

Thank God someone in congress is finally calling the lie to this drivelsnot that the government is routinely putting out.

To give you the importance in scale of these revisions, one of the articles in boldface below states,

BLS has been releasing rosy jobs reports, only to quietly update the reports later with more accurate and dismal statistics….
The early downward revisions for 2024 follow the BLS chopping off more than 300,000 jobs last year that were supposedly added in the 12 months ending in March 2023….
The BLS confirmed what we have been saying for much of the past year, namely that hundreds of thousands of US jobs were nothing more than a figment in the BLS’s imagination, and politically motivated Excel spreadsheets

Another article in today’s headlines comments that, “with exceptionalism like this, who needs enemies.”

It digs into the faulty representation of our economy these numbers have presented as claims are repeated over and over through the parrot press that the “economy is strong and resilient” based primarily on total fake labor statistics, even to the extent of whining about why the average American keeps feeling sour about an economy so good. They want to make you think you’re the mad one because surely the numbers don’t lie. Numbers can’t be mad. They’re just numbers, right?

Not so, claims the article. If you dig into the numbers they are as horrible as The Daily Doom has been telling you with real-news commentary everyday far ahead of the mainstream media catching on to the obvious. (Denial and groupthink/party politics on either side all tend to work that way.)

Peter Tchir explains why the consumer feels so bleak about the actually bleak economy that is being made to sound actually rosy. His full-time employment graph says in a picture what would take a thousand words:

Looks broken and pathetic to me! I’ve pointed out similar graphs in the past, but his focus on full-time employment makes the picture even more dismal. As I’ve written here, most of the new jobs during the Biden years have been part-time jobs or have gone to immigrants. People making ends meet with a single full-time job that provides solid benefits tend to experience more actual contentedness with how the economy is going than people who patch together 2-3 part-time jobs, running all over the place, with no benefits in order to make it through.

If that were the graph of a patient in a hospital, you’d think something lethal had suddenly happened to him; yet, he had survived because the defibrillator worked, but then never recovered to anything looking like his old long-familiar health. You’d say, this guy must be rolling around in a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle now. Having once been a “strong and resilient,” mountain-climbing athlete, he’s not likely to be too happy with his new condition, because for a few years now his hiking days have been over. Yet, some in the mainstream press have been so dumb as to write about a week ago in the headlines here, “What are people complaining about?”

Says Tchir without an cheer,

Maybe this is one reason why the “perception” of the economy isn’t as good as the data suggests? Because we pick and choose which data people should pay attention to, that is distorting the reality of the economy most people face.

The people at the Fed who eat caviar at their luncheons haven’t noticed. The head of the Bureau of Lying Statistics certainly hasn’t noticed. Most of the mainstream press hasn’t noticed, other than one publisher that woke up a week ago for a brief moment but has gone back to sleep for now.

Tchir joins me in pointing out, as I did last week, that consumer confidence does not see what the Jerome Foul sees from his Fed office (pardon the name derision; it is just how Siri corrects what I type as she uses AI to sense what I think.):

CONsumer CONfidence solidified the direction we had to go. For those of you who read the T-Report regularly, you know that I am suspicious of the validity of the CONsumer CONfidence survey (hence the double CON). But apparently the devil can quote scripture for his or her own purposes, so why can’t I?
Confidence plunged to 67 from 77 and had one of the biggest misses versus expectations of all time. Current conditions and future conditions didn’t matter – it was bad across the board. Inflation expectations (which the Fed pays attention to) seem to be “less anchored” than they were as the one- year inflation expectation jumped to 3.5% from 3.2% (the highest since November). The 10-year crept back to 3.1%. It had gotten to 3.2% in November, but other than that one print, this is tied as the highest longer-term inflation measure since this whole mess began!

Consumers are looking at raw reality, not adjusted numbers. They’re looking at prices in grocery stores where, as I say in the GoldSeek Radio Nugget interview posted below, seasonal adjustments are meaningless. You can “correct” the normal seasonal boost to prices this time to post a number that is supposed to reflect the underlying effect on inflation, but consumers don’t pay adjusted numbers! They pay raw numbers! All they see is that this season prices are WAY higher.

You can be sure the same chicanery is happening in the Biden admin’s adjustments to its adjustments in CPI as has been clearly identified now in congress with the labor stats, and that his government will be just as nonchalant about all of that as they were about their obvious tinkering with the labor statistics. (Seriously? The same 212,000 new jobless claims month after month? Who’s going to believe that? I’ll tell you who: Only those who are creating the numbers, and the Fed and parrot press.) Consumers are feeling more dismal now, not just because they know prices are higher and jobs are worse but because they either realize they are being lied to (so are dismal about the government doing anything right) or think they are crazy because their view of reality doesn’t square with what they are being told is real.

That’s why, really, reading The Daily Doom, doesn’t make one feel gloomy, so much as it makes one feel sane again because it helps them see how the government is rigging its reports to try to make you feel better than reality dictates. So, please share this with those whose mental health you care about. Life actually feels a little more solid when you have some truth to help clear your head even if it is not the truth you want to hear.