Statistics.

Statistics means never having to say you're certain, but they can reveal stuff that some would keep hidden, and hide what might be damaging to reveal. I've been carping about the government cooking the books on unemployment for ages here, and the folks at Zero Hedge have been helping by doing all the heavy lifting. After seeing what they have produced, half the internet is reduced to saying "what they said!".

The latest exercise in wool-pulling is the triumphant crowing about 243,000 people finding jobs last month. First keep in mind that in a growing country it takes 150,000 or so new jobs a month just to break even and keep the unemployment rate static.

The second thing to remember is that when people give up on finding work, they cease to exist as far as the BLS is concerned. Do the math, which isn't that hard, and notice that when the unemployed quit looking for work, the unemployment rate falls. Find work for 243,000 and push 1.2M off the statistical cliff, and voila! unemployment drops by about half a point.

If you assume that all those people who have quit looking for work haven't won the lottery or something, and actually would like a job, the actual unemployment rate is now 11.5%.
Cooking the books.

Update: I am now hearing that those 1.2M people didn't drop out of the workforce, but were actually eliminated by the Census Bureau. Zero Hedge evidently didn't get the memo, so his numbers are off. I wondered about that myself since I know that people drop out of the workforce, which makes the unemployment numbers look better, but not usually in such large quantities. My position that the numbers are being jiggered remains unshaken. The exact amout is TBD. With labor force participation heading for the basement anyway, it's useful to understand that when it reaches about 58%, unemployment will appear to be zero.