Phantom Jobs Mask Extent of Joblessness

By Jeff Nielson 06/03/11 - 05:56 PM EDT

The following commentary comes from an independent investor or market observer as part of TheStreet's guest contributor program, which is separate from the company's news coverage.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In many previous commentaries I have maintained that the "statistics" from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics have lost almost any relevance or analytical value.

Where we can still find some small analytical value in these numbers is to compare the differences in the BLS' (revised) aggregate numbers with the headline it has been dispensing each month. Unfortunately, the revised aggregate numbers only provide us with data up to the end of 2010. However we can still reach some interesting conclusions based upon the available numbers.

The U.S. propaganda machine tells us that the "great recession" ended in March 2009, while the BLS has been reporting monthly "job gains" in nearly every report since that time. As a matter of simple arithmetic, if the U.S. economy began adding jobs in the spring of 2009 (and the job losses had supposedly eased in the months immediately prior to that), we should have seen the year-over-year numbers turn positive no later than the end of 2009 when we looked at the total number of employed workers in the U.S. (as calculated by the same BLS).

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