President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

The economy has contracted two quarters in a row if you believe the BEA. But we are at full employment if you believe the BLS.

Apparently pigs can fly.

The reality about the BLS number is: 1) Their seasonal adjustments -- which can make a loss of jobs in their survey into a huge gain in imaginary jobs in their report -- have gotten completely random (and politicized). 2) The U3 number (and the U6) may accurately give a picture of the trend, but when the labor force participation rate is at 62 percent (and keeps declining, as it did again in the new report), and more than 20 percent of the country is on some form of welfare, of course you have created a farcical number that tells everyone the unemployment rate is low by simply not including a chunk of unemployed people as actually existing. It really is that simple.

That is not a "fake numbers" narrative motivated by some political agenda. It's just being fucking honest.

If you calculate the unemployment rate the way they did before they simply began that path of excluding more and more workers in the early 1990s, the actual unemployment rate in this country would be somewhere over 20 percent, a la the work that John Williams at Shadowstats does: Alternate Unemployment Charts (you may need to subscribe to get to his stuff).