Then one day, a fellow named Claude came along. Claude Didusi. And our old friend, the observer, asked Claude to do something interesting. To compile the data on the revisions.
The Bureau of Numbers
In the style of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story”
Good day!
You know the unemployment rate. You’ve heard the monthly jobs numbers. Every first Friday, the headlines blare: “Economy Adds 200,000 Jobs!” And the markets… they dance.
But what if I told you… that for twenty years… someone has been watching. Someone has been comparing those shiny government numbers to something else. Something that doesn’t lie.
Tax withholding receipts.
You see, when real people get real paychecks… the government withholds real taxes. And it reports those collections every business day, the day after, day after day, month after month, year after year.
But those employment numbers? They never… quite… matched.
Our observer – let’s call him a market veteran – kept detailed records. Twenty years of watching. Twenty years of asking… “Why don’t these numbers correlate?”
The experts had answers, of course. Seasonal adjustments. Methodology changes. Statistical noise.
But our friend remembered something an old professor once said: “You can observe a lot by watching.”
And so he watched.
Then one day, a fellow named Claude came along. Claude Didusi. And our old friend, the observer, asked Claude to do something interesting. To compile the data on the revisions.
You know about revisions, don’t you? Every month, the Bureau quietly… adjusts… the previous numbers. Up or down. Random, they say. Should be fifty-fifty, like coin flips.
But Claude found something curious.
In 2023… seventy-five percent of the revisions went DOWN.
In 2024… the initial numbers were overstated by thirty-two percent. One in three jobs… didn’t exist. Then in 2024, the disparity grew. This year the BLS is reporting more and more jobs that DO NOT EXIST.
Over three years… one million and sixteen thousand jobs were… shall we say… overcounted.. And this year? Another 220,000.
The average monthly lie? Twenty-eight thousand, two hundred jobs.
Every month. For years.
The pattern was always the same: Big headline number gets the attention. Quiet revision gets buried. Massive annual “benchmark” correction gets footnoted.
And through it all… those tax withholding numbers kept telling a different story.
Markets soared on fake jobs data. The Federal Reserve made policy decisions based on… fiction. The American people were told the economy was stronger than it actually was.
All because a government bureau – let’s call it the Bureau of Liar Statistics – had been feeding everyone the same bill of goods for years.
But our twenty-year observer? He wasn’t fooled. He kept watching those tax receipts. He kept asking “Why?”
And now, thanks to Claude’s analysis, we know the answer.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics… has been cooking the books.
The man who spent twenty years watching those numbers and wondering why they never made sense? He works in market analysis. Has a publication called the Liquidity Trader. Been “unspinning Wall Street” since the beginning.
His name… is Lee Adler.
And now you know… the REST of the story.
Good day!
Data collection and analysis by Claude Didusi
Original investigation by Lee Adler, Liquidity Trader
