...Glenn Beck is repeating it on television. I recently wrote about an idea being promoted on Business Insider, a financial news website, that October's employment report was misleading due to bad data adjustment. Well, it turns out that Beck was ahead of me; yesterday on his show he noted, quite accurately, that "some people would say [the government] lied to you, but those would only be people like me":
BECK: Who can you trust? Can you trust the government and their numbers right now? Well we know about their numbers for the jobs that they reported on Friday and they're better than expected. That's good right? Job numbers earlier this month, payrolls supposedly expanded by over 151,000 jobs. That's great. I mean, look at the headlines here. It's fantastic.
Bad news here: They misled you. They misled you. Some people would say they lied to you but those would only be people like me. The government changed the seasonal adjustment. They changed that formula so they could make the -- boost the job numbers, the number of jobs created in October by 100,000 jobs.
But, as I explained yesterday, the government didn't do anything unusual during October's seasonal adjustment, and regardless of the adjustment process, it was easily the second-largest increase in jobs during October in the last decade. There's just not much there on the theory. The idea that the government is secretly boosting employment numbers doesn't even make that much sense, since lying about jobs numbers for political gain assumes people will vote based on government statistics and not on their own economic situation, an unlikely proposition. But the rumor does allow people who don't check their facts -- people like Beck -- to create more suspicion of the government, however unfounded. Civil servants just trying to do their job can't compete.
-- Tim Fernholz
