As many suspected at the time, the pre-2012 election unemployment rate was even more fraudulent than is customary:
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington. The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy. And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked. The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census.
Those of you who have read RGD will recall that in the chapter entitled “No One Knows Anything”, I pointed out that the various numbers reported by the BLS and the BEA cannot possibly be legitimate. GDP, CPI, U3, all of them are fiction. The margins of error are greater than the difference between reported growth and reported contraction, thereby rendering Keynesian theory unworkable in practice. And they are extraordinarily expensive fictions, because material policies with effects in the trillions are being made and justified on the basis of those known and confirmed fictions.
This is just one more proof of the superiority of the Austrian logical approach to Keynesian pseudo-pragmatism. I once likened the attempts to manage the economy as trying to steer a car with a sledgehammer: it’s not very precise and you’re probably first going to wreck the steering wheel and then the car. But trying to manage the economy on the basis of numbers you know are manufactured is like trying to steer a car with a sledgehammer while wearing the wrong prescription sunglasses.
The Great Depression 2.0 is not coming. We are now in the fifth year of it, regardless of what the BLS and the BEA are telling you.