Census ‘faked’ 2012 election jobs report

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.


http://nypost.com/2013/11/18/census-faked-2012-election-jobs-report/

I’ve been suspicious of the Census Bureau for a long time.

During the 2010 Census report — an enormous and costly survey of the entire country that goes on for a full year — I suspected (and wrote in a number of columns) that Census was inexplicably hiring and firing temporary workers.

I suspected that this turnover of employees was being done purposely to boost the number of new jobs being report each month. (The Labor Department does not use the Census Bureau for its other monthly survey of new jobs — commonly referred to as the Establishment Survey.)

Last week I offered to give all the information I have, including names, dates and charges to Labor’s inspector general.

I’m waiting to hear back from Labor.

I hope the next stop will be Congress, since manipulation of data like this not only gives voters the wrong impression of the economy but also leads lawmakers, the Federal Reserve and companies to make uninformed decisions.

To cite just one instance, the Fed is targeting the curtailment of its so-called quantitative easing money-printing/bond-buying fiasco to the unemployment rate for which Census provided the false information.

So falsifying this would, in essence, have dire consequences for the country.


http://nypost.com/2013/11/18/census-faked-2012-election-jobs-report/

Isn't that reason enough to fire the man?

I'm losing faith with our whole government. This gets crazier and crazier.

Congress may soon investigate a media report claiming the Labor Department falsified the nation's jobless numbers a month before the 2012 election.

A Republican aide told the Washington Examiner the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is digging into the claim, published in the New York Post on Tuesday.

"The allegation that data gathered by the Census Bureau is being manipulated for any reason is extremely serious," the GOP aide told the Examiner.

"The Oversight Committee has jurisdiction over the Census Bureau and will be thoroughly investigating these claims."

The Census Bureau is part of the Commerce, but in 2009 the Obama administration altered the chain of command so that the Census Bureau director now reports to the White House as well as the department secretary. Republicans protested the change, saying that it undercuts the independence and trustworthiness of the Census.


The Post reports that an employee at the Census Bureau, Julius Buckmon, fabricated data for the monthly employment report because he could not reach people to complete the survey.

Buckmon, the Post reported, was "not the only one" faking the data.

The Census worker did not cite a political motive, telling the Post he simply needed to fill in the missing information.

Buckmon, according to the Post, is one of the top producers of data for the monthly jobless report, conducting three times as many household interviews as his colleagues.

The Post said Buckmon faked the survey results for the September 2012 jobs report, which was released on October 5, 2012 — a month before the presidential election — and showed a sharp drop from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent even though only 114,000 jobs were added in September.

Obama touted the shrinking jobless numbers in campaign stump speeches, citing it as a reason voters should give him a second term.

Skeptics questioned the jobs numbers at the time. Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, sent out a Tweet the day the report was released, calling the numbers "unbelievable," and suggesting the Obama administration had manipulated them. He received much criticism for the Tweet and had to walk it back.


http://washingtonexaminer.com/congress-will-investigate-report-of-faked-pre-election-jobs-data/article/2539413

But nobody listened to Jack, did they. The media ignored him.

WHL wrote:But nobody listened to Jack, did they.  The media ignored him.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh played the tapes of his agreeing with Jack Welch, and added,

"The only way for Totalitarians to stay in power is to lie."

And that is what we've gotten.

 

Detroit!