THE nation's monthly em ployment report will be horrible when it is released tomorrow morning. But this much is certain, the Labor Department will contend - defying common sense - that there is a healthy number of new companies being formed that are creating large amounts of jobs.
It is time to end this fraud.
Officially this game is called the Current Employment Statistics Net Birth/Death Model and I've been writing about it for a long time.
This calculation is supposed to pick up jobs being created by new companies so small that they can't possibly be surveyed.
In reality, the Birth/Death model is nothing more than a way for the politicians and bureaucrats in Washington to try to make us feel a little bit better about the economy - and them.
So tell me, is this charade making you feel any better?
Except for the January employment report, the Labor Department always includes a hefty amount of jobs in its monthly count that it can't prove really exist.
In all, 800,000 of these phony positions have been added this year.
Now that the obvious has been officially recognized and we now know the country has been in a recession since last December, the government should stop playing games with our economic statistics!
The experts believe the unemployment rate that will be announced tomorrow will jump to 6.8 percent from October's 6.5 percent.
And the experts also think the government will announce that an astounding 325,000 jobs disappeared in November, compared with a merely shocking 240,000 lost jobs reported in October.
But with hardly anyone noticing it, the department will also add around 17,000 non-existent jobs to its count for these supposedly invisible new companies.
It's time for these shenanigans to end.
It was this sort of opaqueness - specifically related to mortgages and bank accounting - that caused our current problems.
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