I’ve ranted about the BLS Birth/Death adjustment for years. It is BLS computer model generated estimate of the jobs added by start-up companies that are not captured in their surveys of large companies. The model is based upon long-term historical trends and would be relatively accurate if the world stayed the same. The BLS has pretended the world stayed the same after 2008, when it was really turned upside down.
These are the annual phantom jobs added to the BLS calculations since 2008:
2008 – 904,000
2009 – 882,000
2010 – 510,000
2011 – 490,000
2012 – 535,000
2013 – 624,000
2014 – 733,000
This is a total of 4,678,000 phantom jobs supposedly created by small company start-ups since 2008. This assumes there have been more business start-ups than business failures, just as had always happened throughout U.S. history. There had always been approximately 100,000 net new businesses in the U.S. every year going back to the 1970s. But, the BLS model has been dreadfully wrong since 2008. There has been net closures of 70,000 per year for the last six years.
The birth death adjustment should have SUBTRACTED at least 2 million jobs since 2008, not added 4.7 million phantom jobs.
There were 145 million Americans employed in 2008. The BLS says 148 million Americans are employed today. If you make the true birth/death adjustment, the real number of employed Americans would be approximately 141 million. Which figure makes more sense when you see the putridly stagnant real wages and the complete lack of retail spending from the supposedly employed masses?
Government statistics are like the American Dream. You’d have to be asleep to believe them.
Exactly!
Now count the destruction of family supporting, and the explosion of McJobs. And government jobs, which are costing the private sector jobs too.
Until I checked the Small Business Administration’s website in 2005, I had believed that small and mid-sized business was still creating 70% of all private jobs. Funny thing was the sba.gov stated it was 45%.
It has fallen so much further since then.
No small guys, no future. Our entire way of life is contingent on businesses that no longer exist, and couldn’t exist in today’s regulatory environment anyway.
This happened during Prohibition too, funny how the loss of hundreds of thousands of brewery and distillery jobs is ignored in the lead up to the Depression.
It was covered up by free money (coincidence? sure it is, just like this past decade has been) and the rich getting richer while the dwindling middle defended them – and the status quo of “evil drink” allowing intentional government destruction of the productive middle.
I’ll bet if you could be a fly on the wall,you would notice that all reversals of economic fortunes are preceded by government/biggest dick takeover of the little productive.
Our true rulers never seem to lose power completely, which is probably why the truth for the common man is covered up and history rewritten to convince us of myths. *sigh* I wonder why I continue to beat myself up.
And Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Inc., etc., still lobbies for foreign work permits, claiming there are not enough Americans to fill their high-tech positions. Utter bullshit.
This bullshit “birth/death” adjustment is one of my pet peeves too, Admin. FedGov is the last to know things have “changed” in the real economy. How convenient, but I guess if you never leave the beltway you don’t see the thousands of empty strip malls and stand-alone buildings that used to house small mom&pop businesses.
So sad that journalism no longer exists and no MSM has bothered to pin the assholes to the wall and discover exactly what the “birth/death” formula is, and the $64 Billion question, have they even bothered to adjust it post 2008. We all know the answer to that one. No.
What’s the starting pay for a phantom position?
I retired from the BLS and am sad to confirm what the poster says. Over the years, each president moved more functions and positions closer to Wash DC and farther from the truth. They know what is going on but TPTB pull the strings. Global Warming, Chemtrails, GMO’s, Vaccines, the National Debt, IRS, Fed Reserve, NSA-CIA-FBI-DoJ-DoD-DHS etc, public education, media fairness-neutrality, Cultural Communism, vote fraud, financial regulations enforcement, the real military and DHS motives, Drug “Enforcement”, Crime and Economic Statistics, etc etc are all as honest as the Warren-Waco-Twin Towers Commissions reports; forked tongue, crooked arrow, window dressing, lying bullshit. .
To make matters worse, many of the current jobs are part-time. So, there would have had to be an actual decline in hours worked.
So, many more mouth breathers to support, and fewer hours being worked to do it.
To maintain position, the US needs to get 2.5% more productive each year, and add two or three million more jobs annually.
So the US is a minimum of 15-20 million jobs behind where it should be since 2008.
Sweet. That is great news, I am sure. Let the media spin, spin, spin.
Once I become a phantom worker at a phantom job, can I also become a phantom taxpayer and pocket the phantom cash?