From It’s Still the Economy, Stupid:

The economic revisionism has begun…

So, yes, the US unemployment rate was released this morning, and no real surprises there - up .1% to 6.1%, the highest level in 9 years. Economists actually expect the rate to continue to climb over the next few months, even if the economy turns around, as only phenomenal economic conditions could accommodate the millions of high school and college graduates expected to enter the job force this summer.

But the real story is the one mentioned here yesterday, newly instituted changes in the “Establishment Survey Data”, which essentially counts the number of jobs created or eliminated in any given month. Not only does the BLS plan on using these new “adjustments” going forward, but it plans on revising previous data as well. I got my first clue as to just exactly what that might mean from this snippet in this morning’s AP report on the jobless numbers:

Payrolls fell by 17,000 in May following a revision in April, in which no jobs were lost (my emphasis). Industries driving the cuts were manufacturing, transportation and government.

Now, I seem to remember that somewhere around 50,000 jobs were reported to have been lost in April, but I couldn’t pull up that data on the BLS website, as, in place of the usual archives

The data from the Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National) program is currently unavailable. We will restore the data as soon as possible. For immediate assistance, contact our data specialist listed below. Thank you for your interest in BLS data, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

Well, fortunately, I wasn’t kidding yesterday when I suggested people download the old data, and took my own advice. Lo and behold, when I looked up it up in my trusty Excel spreadsheet, as of yesterday, prior to today’s “revisionism”, the BLS reported a loss of 48,000 jobs in April. I sometimes hate it when I’m right.

I guess it’s one more thing to add to the list of MIA under this Administration:

WMDs in Iraq
The Child Tax cut for the working poor
Indictments for Ken Lay
Jobs
BLS reporting of jobs

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