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.
