Tim Nerenz suspects a conspiracy between the feds and opponents of Gov. Scott Walker, and for good reason:

Recently, the Bureau [of Labor Statistics] named Wisconsin as the state with the worst job loss in November, with a decline of 14,600.  This came on the heels of 9,700 jobs BLS reported lost in October.  The Badger State’s two-month total of 24,300 jobs lost led the nation in workplace suckage; and opponents of Wisconsin Governor Walker eagerly jumped on the November BLS presser to bolster their sagging effort to recall him.

One anonymous commenter on my blog site asked me (ok, taunted) what I had to say about those BLS numbers, since I had just written a piece opposing the recall.  Instead of reading the BLS press release, I visited the underlying data tables (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.t03.htm) and discovered a slightly different story.

The BLS data show that Wisconsin’s workforce dropped from 3,057,800 in September to 3,055,200 in November, while the number of unemployed in Wisconsin fell from 238,600 to 223,800.  Since the workforce is only made up of two parts — the employed and the unemployed — simple subtraction reveals there were 2,819,200 people working in September and 2,831,400 in November.

Do you see what’s wrong with this picture?

That’s right — the BLS data shows an increase of 12,200 jobs during those two months, not the loss of 24,300 reported to the press by the union humps who run the joint.  I asked them for an explanation — two bucks says I will hear from Dick Clark again before I get any response from the humble public servants who work for me.  Five bucks says no journalist will even bother to ask.

The BLS data reconciles perfectly; unemployment drops by 14,800 because 12,200 jobs are added and 2,600 leave the workforce (retire, move out of state, go back to school, etc.).  On the other hand, I could find no combination of numbers that can be tortured into a computation of a 24,300 job loss in October/November.  If you can crack the code, I will be happy to print the recipe here at Moment of Clarity.

Why would the BLS report something different from its own statistics?

So I am not surprised that the BLS data does not support its agency heads’ pressers. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to guess at possible reasons why Obama appointees at the Department of Unions might want to propagandize against the nation’s top union buster, Governor Walker.  Or perhaps it was just a simple error — two months in a row.  Yeah … yeah, that’s the ticket.

And don’t even get on your high horse, Demski’s; it’s not about you.  I don’t care if they are Republican, Democrat, or just members of the Permanent Government Workers Party, they say whatever they want if it serves their own interest. If my Libertarian party ever took control, we would soon be corrupted too; human nature does not grant waivers to humans.

That’s why we need to shut it all down; all but the 18 essential services authorized by the Constitution. Put the Department of Labor and its Bureau of Labor Statistics high on the list of first to go. If you want accurate labor statistics, buy them from Manpower; they are a private sector firm that makes their living by accurately assessing job markets. They are not too big to fail, so they have to get it right.