Quote:“I think we’re sitting on an economic bubble. A financial bubble. First of all, we’re not at 5% unemployment. We’re at a number that’s probably into the twenties if you look at the real number. That was a number that was devised, statistically devised to make politicians - and, in particular, presidents - look good. And I wouldn’t be getting the kind of massive crowds that I’m getting if the number was a real number.”

Quote:There is still a substantial minority of people who argue that the US never really left the 2008 recession. They do not believe official data and argue that unemployment is much higher than the official figures. We'll take a dispassionate look at this and portray the development of the labor market with the development of multiple indicators.

Quote:Government data this morning showed that the U.S. gained 215,000 new jobs last month. Unemployment ticked up to 5 percent from 4.9 percent, as more people returned to the labor force. Wages increased 0.3 percent month to month, and are up 2.3 percent year over year. Payrolls expanded for the 70th consecutive month, averaging 198,000 a month during that stretch. Since the Great Recession ended, 14.5 million new private-sector jobs have been added to the economy.

Quote:The number of U.S. workers who applied for new unemployment benefits fell for the second straight week to match its lowest level since 1973, in the latest sign of a robust labor market.

Quote:Every few years, claims flare up that there’s a suppressed measure of “real unemployment,” far higher than whatever the Labor Department’s latest report says. Thus it may come as a surprise that the first conspiracy theory about the unemployment rate, which emerged in the 1960s, was that the Labor Department was seeking to artificially inflate unemployment—to advance communist objectives, naturally. Ironically, the claims largely revolved around efforts to measure “discouraged” people who weren’t actively seeking work. Today, the exclusion of the discouraged is often presented as Exhibit A that the numbers are manipulated. The original theory held that their inclusion was the method of manipulation.

Quote:“We have a real unemployment rate that’s probably 21%,” Mr. Trump told Time magazine in August 2015. “It’s not 6. It’s not 5.2 and 5.5. Our real unemployment rate–in fact, I saw a chart the other day, our real unemployment–because you have 90 million people that aren’t working, 93 million to be exact. If you start adding it up, our real unemployment rate is 42%.”

In August 2015, according to the Labor Department, the unemployment rate was 5.1%. Mr. Trump was right that many millions of Americans did not have jobs and were not counted as unemployed. But for most, that’s because they were not actively looking for work—such as retirees, stay-at-home parents or teenagers in high school. The number of people outside the labor force in August 2015 was 94 million. It was 95.1 million as of December 2016. And the figure should continue to rise as the U.S. population grows and ages.

Former General Electric Co. chief executive Jack Welch made waves in October 2012 when he questioned the validity of a jobs report released in the lead-up to the presidential election, tweeting that the numbers were “unbelievable” and claiming “these Chicago guys” changed them. (Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign was based in Chicago.)

Mr. Trump took Mr. Welch’s side few days later in a tweet. Economists, including a former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics appointed by President George W. Bush, sided with the government and defended the integrity of the labor statistics. An investigation found no evidence the unemployment rate was manipulated ahead of the election..

Quote:President Trump's budget director claims the Obama administration was "manipulating" jobs data. Mick Mulvaney told CNN's Jake Tapper on Sunday that he has long thought the previous administration framed data to make the unemployment rate "look smaller than it actually was." "What you should really look at is the number of jobs created," Mulvaney said on "State of the Union." "We've thought for a long time, I did, that the Obama administration was manipulating the numbers, in terms of the number of people in the workforce, to make the unemployment rate -- that percentage rate -- look smaller than it actually was." Trump repeatedly railed on the unemployment rate during Obama's time in office as a "hoax." Trump once claimed that he had "heard" the rate could be as high as 42% -- even though at the time it was about 5%.

Quote:Throughout the campaign, Trump openly mocked employment data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis as “phony” and “totally fiction.” His tone changed when he wanted to take credit for a good jobs report. In March, Sean Spicer said at a press briefing that the President wanted to make clear that the unemployment rate “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.” The White House press corps laughed, but, to government statisticians, the words sounded less like a joke and more like a threat. “When I saw that, I said, ‘Wow. You said the numbers were wrong,’ ” Kathleen Utgoff, who ran the B.L.S. under President George W. Bush, told me. “ ‘Now you are politicizing them.’ ” She said that she is “terrified” by the President’s willingness to declare the government data “very real” or fake news based solely on how they reflect on him.

Quote:There is still a substantial minority of people who argue that the US never really left the 2008 recession. They do not believe official data and argue that unemployment is much higher than the official figures. We'll take a dispassionate look at this and portray the development of the labor market with the development of multiple indicators.