Are they playing with the unemployment numbers?

[Carl]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The unemployment rate dropped unexpectedly in January to 9.7 percent, while employers shed 20,000 jobs, according to a report that offered hope the economy will add jobs soon.

The unemployment rate dropped from 10 percent because a survey of households found the number of employed Americans rose by 541,000, the Labor Department said Friday. The job losses are calculated from a separate survey of employers...

http://newstribune.com/articles/2010/02/05/business/nt329bus05rate10.txt

Is this the normal method of calculating this or was a "special" survey taken?
Not going tin foil but am curious given what was the general concensus on the numbers this morning before the announcement.

[ColonialMarine0431]

Interesting read on those figures...

The Real Story Behind Our Unemployment Numbers

By John Lott
- FOXNews.com

A slight improvement in the jobless rate but what is the government hiding about the picture for most of 2009?

Most people seem to believe that the number of Americans with jobs is a clearly identifiable number. All you do is count up the number of people with jobs. Unfortunately, that isn't the way it works. The number reported each month is based on surveys, and surveys have can often have problems. As it turns out, the surveys estimating the number of people with jobs reported over the last couple of years suffered from some really big problems. The economy actually lost about 824,000 more jobs during the recession than we previously thought.

But those adjustments have so far only been made through March 2009, and there are strong reasons to believe that the survey data since then also needs to be adjusted downward.

There are two ways economists measure the number of jobs, the establishment survey that asks about 370,000 employers how many people they are employing and the household survey that asks about 110,000 people each month whether they are working.

FULL STORY

[Chris]

Oh yeah... the "seasonally adjusted" unemployment is down but overall, unemployment is up.  It'll go back up next month.

[ColonialMarine0431]

Oh yeah... the "seasonally adjusted" unemployment is down but overall, unemployment is up.  It'll go back up next month.

Good point. All those extra P/T holiday workers I guess.

[Freeper]

I thought of an analogy of what they are doing see what yall think. 

They are saying that cancer deaths went down this month by 30% because 30% of cancer patients died from swine flu.

It's insane to say its progress when more people than ever do not have jobs a lot of them just fell off the radar because they are no longer drawing unemployment checks and not even bothering to look for work.

[Javelin]

I thought of an analogy of what they are doing see what yall think. 

They are saying that cancer deaths went down this month by 30% because 30% of cancer patients died from swine flu.

It's insane to say its progress when more people than ever do not have jobs a lot of them just fell off the radar because they are no longer drawing unemployment checks and not even bothering to look for work.

Thats only part of the insanity when you look at how they calculate the unemployment numbers to begin with.  Its nothing but a sham, they can manipulate the numbers any way they wish.  Once upon a time the media was what helped to keep them in check but today thats not even an issue.  I do not think that enough people pay attention to the manipulation on these stats nor the manipulation in the markets from our now many Federal banks and funds we have acquired over the past year.