Home
Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Dave Kranzler on the BLS Payroll Report
Guest contribution: Dave Kranzler on the BLS August Payroll Report
I am not doing a payroll employment report this month. It is the same old thing. No goods producing jobs, just lowly paid nontradable domestic services: 44,000 in retail trade, 38,000 in health care and social assistance (primarily ambulatory health care services), 21,000 waitresses and bartenders.
The decline in the rate of unemployment is not a result of more jobs. Actually fewer people are employed. The unemployment rate fell because the labor force shrank again as hundreds of thousands more Americans gave up looking for a job and, thus, are no longer counted as unemployed members of the labor force.
If you want to read a bit more, here is Dave Kranzler’s report: http://truthingold.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-non-farm-payroll-report-bls.html
Dave might be a bit hard on the BLS statisticians. The considerable independence that civil service professionals formerly had was destroyed when the Clinton regime encouraged and coerced early retirements in order to make room for women and minorities. The civil service’s professionalism and institutional memory was damaged by clearing out many of the people who represented both. The Bush-Cheney regime took advantage of the weakened position of the civil service and dispensed with fact altogether in order to aid the corporate takeover of the environmental regulatory agencies and to coerce the kind of false reports that Secretary of State Colin Powell was sent to deliver at the UN.