Good news! There's a lot less data falsification going on at the Census Bureau these days.
How do I know? Because Census is having a very tough time meeting its quotas. Once the cheating was reduced, Census workers couldn't pretend anymore to be doing their jobs.
On Friday, the Labor Department will release employment figures for February, and the experts anticipate that the jobless rate in the US will drop to 5.6 percent from January's 5.7 percent.
The data that go into that unemployment rate are gathered monthly by an army of Census workers. It used to be an easy job. Census would effortlessly exceed its goal of completing 90 percent of the surveys it started — a quota set by its customer, the Labor Department.
Remember — 90 percent. Labor wanted Census to complete interviews for nine out of every 10 US households chosen for the survey.
According to data provided to me by a very reliable source, Census hit only 87.39 percent nationally in February. And Atlanta, at 90.52 percent, was the only one of the six Census regions that met the quota.
During my year-long investigation, Atlanta was the only region in which whistle-blowers didn't report cheating on the surveys.
The other regions all came in below quota during the January survey, some dramatically so: New York, 82.84 percent; Philadelphia, 85.44 percent; Chicago, 88.06 percent; Denver, 88.02 percent; and Los Angeles, 89.41 percent.
And Census was only able to reach those modest totals by leaving the data gathering period open for two extra days! (I'm told the success rate on the crime survey, which is done monthly by Census for the Justice Department, is even more abysmal — 50 percent against an 80 percent goal.)
It's good that Census is stopping the cheats. In fact, I was thrilled to report recently that everyone at Census will soon be fingerprinted and given background checks.
The economic data this agency collects are extremely important to the US and can't be left in the hands of people who simply want to get interviews done so they can earn government bonuses.
But Labor needs to admit that it's having problems with its unemployment data. If falsification was rampant — as I believe it was — the less-tainted data now being collected are not comparable to the results compiled in the past.
The existence of tainted data is important for another reason. It goes a long way toward explaining why many economists are puzzled about why job market gains look stronger than the rest of the economy.
The second part of Friday's employment report will be the so-called Establishment Survey. That is supposed to tell us how many new jobs were created by US companies last month.
This survey is completely independent of the one on unemployment (called the Current Population or Household Survey). And Labor itself compiles the data for the Establishment Survey — so there's no question here of falsification.
But the Establishment Survey is full of wacky adjustments.
So, the headline number you'll see reported and widely devoured at 8:30 a.m. Friday could turn out to be very different from reality.
For the Establishment Survey, the experts are predicting that 230,000 new jobs were created in February. That would be lower than the 257,000 newly created positions in January.
Look, I don't have the space to explain this again. But there really weren't 257,000 new jobs in January. If you look at the raw data, you'll see that there was really a loss of 2.755 million jobs. There are never job gains in January.
The 257,000 figure shows up only after the raw data (the 2.755 million job drop) is seasonally adjusted.
So, will Friday's numbers meet expectations of 230,000 new jobs? That all depends on the seasonal adjustments.
Based on past years' performances, Labor's computers should be expecting decent job gains in the February raw data.
The question is, will the real-world economy disappoint the computers?
Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry told the Conservative Political Action Committee last week that the "unemployment rate is a sham."
Since Republican Perry might run for president, the Democrats got all over him for dismissing the gains made in the unemployment rate during the Obama Administration — from 10 percent in Oct. 2009 to 5.7 percent last month.
I wish both sides would shut up!
Here are the facts: Yes, the unemployment rate is down. And some of that is because of the new jobs created over the last six years.
But much of the decline in the unemployment rate has come about because Labor doesn't count someone as being out of work unless that person is actively looking for a job.
If you've completely given up looking because you don't think you can find a job, you aren't unemployed.
It's a guess what the unemployment rate would be if you count all these discouraged workers, but I've seen a number as high as 20 percent.
Bankrate.com has this bit of disturbing information.
Thirty-seven percent of Americans have credit card debt that exceeds their emergency savings.
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