By Les Dunaway

The monthly unemployment numbers came out from the DOL this week. They were summarized in the media as a drop from 9.1 to 9.0. Many people reacted with surprise as such a drop was counter-intuitive, especially when the reported jobs-created was 80,000 – somewhere between a third and a half of what’s needed to reduce unemployment.

I’m happy to report that the confusion was simply government book-cooking, not a repeal of the rules of arithmetic.

There’s a little thing called the birth death adjustment. Now, it has nothing to do with people dying on unemployment – although that’s getting to be a real concern. The birth and death this measure addresses is those of businesses. The idea is that when a business is started, it adds jobs and when a business closes it subtracts jobs.  Which, in normal times, might have some validity. However, today, many if not most new corporations are sub-S representing someone who can’t get a job and has “started a business”.

We can discuss the validity or not of such adjustments. We need not discuss the reporting of the numbers without mentioning such adjustments – it amounts to willful misinformation.

In this case, the 80,000 new jobs created were part of the 103,000 imaginary jobs created by the adjustment. In other words, the headlines should have read 23, 000 Jobs Lost.

Here’s a look at the “adjustments” for the past year [read] – a total of 606,000 imaginary jobs.

Irwin Stelzer, writing in the Weekly Standard, talks of “The Good, The Bad and the Ambiguous” and looks at the implications of the real, un-cooked numbers.

Here’s a look at the actual unemployment numbers, the unemployed who are out of benefits and the trends [read].

It may not make you feel better (in fact, it should scare the s–t out of you) but the problems are not just the US. [read] If you’d like to feel even worse, take a look at what the “protesters” in Greece and Italy and Wall Street are saying – it can be summarized as “Give us more free stuff or we’ll burn down the city”.

We can’t do anything to save Europe. But on November 6th 2012, we can begin the process of saving America.