Uncle Sam’s “Data Manipulation Squad” Strikes Again

Numbers, numbers everywhere, not a one for us to trust…

From Forbes…

For most of last week (ending April 5th), financial markets were worried about the upcoming employment report, and when markets fret, the indexes languish. But after Friday morning’s “strong” (on the surface) employment report, those markets breathed a sigh of relief and reversed a major portion of the week’s losses…

[But] prior to March 2022, Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP) and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) were consistent with each other. Then they diverged, and the cumulative difference is that NFP shows up with five million more jobs. We find it strange that [Bureau of Labor Statistics] revised its initial number down in 11 months in 2023. The QCEW report says in the 11-months ended last December, the average monthly payroll growth was +130K, not the +230K claimed by the NFP reports. In fact, this has been verified by the economists at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve.

Strange indeed.

The current presidential administration, as well as apologists in the media (including those who’ve won Nobel Prizes in economics) insist the economy is all that and a bag of chips. The only reason consumers are feeling frumpy, they write in pandering father-knows-best tones, is because consumers are blockheads who just can’t accept that the economy is, indeed, all that and a bag of chips.

Just maybe us blockheads have it right, though?

We might not all have Nobel Prizes in economics, but every last one of us has our own personal Nobel in our own family’s personal economy. And if we say things aren’t feeling so frisky on the home front, then there’s nothing a Nobel Prize-winning economist can write that negates what we know to be true.

More importantly… just maybe it’s the apologists who’ve had it all wrong all along.

Funny thing about most economists I read is that so many of them just take economic news at face value, as if the government would never purposefully manipulate the data to pretend that a gloomy day is really sunny—if you just focus on this pretty poster of Bora Bora we taped to the wall and don’t actually look at the rainstorm pounding the windows.

Every administration does this all the time.

It’s as if to land a government job, you need a PhD in Obfuscation and Mass Manipulation from Prevaricator State University.

The facts Forbes pointed out serve as a pretty good example.

Government dispenses data just about every day. Which means every day is another day for Uncle Sam’s Data Manipulation Squad to earn a paycheck.

Routinely, the data collectors pump out numbers that they then come back and adjust downwards, weeks, months or even a year later, long after anyone really cares.

I get that early data can be a hot take, and that the numbers do require some settling before a true datapoint emerges. But “the average monthly payroll growth was +130K, not the +230K claimed” by the non-farm payroll reports seems a bit more than a hot take would account for.

It seems… purposefully manipulative.

OK. But where does all of this take us?

It takes us back home…

It takes us back to: Believe what you see in your own life with your own eyes.

Jobs market data, supposedly proof of America’s economic strength, is hiding what we all know to be true: good jobs are increasingly scarce. Low-wage service-sector jobs, however, are everywhere.

To be clear, I am not knocking anyone who works in a low-wage or service-sector job. Honest work. But I am saying that a country cannot build a healthy economy on increasing numbers of low-wage jobs. A country cannot build a happy community of citizens when so many of those citizens are working two and three low-wage jobs just to afford life in America.

This is one of the reasons I suspect a crisis is coming to America this decade.

It’s also a very significant component in the divide cleaving Red from Blue. Much of the lower middle class (a lot of those are Red voters) feels their birthright—the American Dream—has been systematically stolen from them. One-third of American adults earn less than $50,000 per year, and they don’t have a lot of runway for upward advancement.

So, they’re rightfully pissed off and talkin’ ‘bout a revolution (to steal a lyric from Tracy Chapman).

And it’s the same revolution I’ve been talking about, too, for several years now. (Revolutions take time to brew. They’re never spontaneous.)

It’s just one of the crises America faces, but it’s going to be big.

The French Revolution on American soil.

Americans who have nothing left to lose will revolt against America’s vast and expanding financial inequalities, and the despair and hardship of struggling to buy a Happy Meal when Federal Reserve-fueled inflation is sucking their wallets dry by driving up the cost of everything… even as their paychecks never keep pace.

I know I sound a little unhinged when I share those kinds of predictions.

But people are people. They will suck it up for only so long before they’re so angry about their own life that they take action to either improve their lot in life… or die trying. Either result, in their mind, is a victory.

So, once again, I tell you to prepare.

We are at the butt end of the American Century, the dying days of the old capitalist system. Way too much wealth is now concentrated in the bank accounts of way too few ultra-wealthy, who also now control government and shape policies that benefit their interests to the detriment of the masses.

But the thing about the masses is that, as an army of the angry and aggrieved, they’re far more powerful than the billions of dollars the wealthy can muster. Just ask a beheaded King Louis XVI.

Change is coming.

The numbers say so.