It's not a lie, it's a correction of a statistical estimate. This is a standard practice when it comes to economic statistics. For instance, the EU also bases preliminary estimates on a survey and does a 6 month revision to the jobs data (although there was almost no change in the most recent release).
This is all clearly spelled out by the BLS when they release the data:
"In accordance with usual practice, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is announcing the preliminary estimate of the upcoming annual benchmark revision to the establishment survey employment series. The final benchmark revision will be issued in February 2025 with the publication of the January 2025 Employment Situation news release."
Here's their methodology - it's completely transparent and available for all to see:
www.bls.gov
The Current Employment Statistics data comes with some pretty wide initial confidence intervals. These get narrower as time progresses, more survey responses come in and the data is cross-checked against other indicators.
Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National) Home Page
www.bls.gov
Because 1) they're not lying to people and 2) people want the data as soon as it's available, whether the figures are preliminary or otherwise. There was a minor flap when the release of the revised data was delayed
40 minutes. Imagine the moaning if the markets had to wait an extra six months.
This isn't "what the administration is doing" though. This is the performance of the jobs market.
Quoting Dean Baker of CEPR:
"First, the people complaining that this downward revision exposes cooked jobs data in prior months need to get their heads screwed on straight. Let’s just try a little logic here.
If the Biden-Harris administration had the ability to cook the job numbers, do we think they are too [blank] to realize that they should keep cooking them at least through November? Seriously, do we think they are total [blank]? If you’ve been cooking the numbers for twenty months, wouldn’t you keep cooking them until Election Day?
Okay, but getting more serious here, the staff of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a professional outfit that does exactly what we want it to do. They produce the data about the economy as best they can in a completely objective way. And they use methods that are completely transparent."
If BLS keeps finding it's data is out of wack, they may need to change their survey approach.
The UK Office for National Statistics has spent the last ~20 months doing something similar working on a new labour survey, as it wasn't getting enough high quality responses. Initially Brexit and COVID-19 were thought to be at fault, but they worked out there were also a couple of inadvertent points of bias in the survey (higher response rates from older and female respondents, some exclusion of those over 65) and it couldn't square preliminary survey data with some updated unemployment/economic inactivity index data.
End result is that the UK has worked out that it has more employed people AND more unemployed people that it though it had. Total labour force estimates went up by about 1 to 1.5 million people, while total unemployed estimates went up by 50,000 to 150,000 people.
www.washingtontimes.com
