Rick Perry in The Huffington Post


On Jobs: The official unemployment rate is massaged and doctored

Unemployment trutherism made its return, alongside Rick Perry at an Iowa breakfast. Perry told a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition that they couldn't trust the official unemployment rate coming out of Washington: "It's been massaged, it's been doctored," Perry said.

Back in 2012, such conspiracy theories became known as unemployment or "BLS trutherism," in reference to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the division of the Labor Department that's responsible for producing the unemployment rate. After some surprisingly upbeat jobs reports that bolstered the campaign of President Barack Obama, skeptical conservatives either implied or said outright that the numbers couldn't be trusted.

As explained at the time, the BLS is devised in such a way that the White House cannot meddle in its math, be it a Democratic or Republican administration. [But BLS truthers compare the official jobless rate of] 5.6% to alternate BLS measures that include discouraged and involuntary part-time workers.

Source: Huffington Post on 2015 Iowa Freedom Summit Jan 26, 2015

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