The answer is to throw a bunch of bogus numbers at the issues, in the hope that something sticks, or at least that the discussion becomes confused.

First, about that jobs report: all the usual suspects have jumped on the routine BLS population adjustment to claim that the numbers were cooked. The real story here is that the BLS estimates unemployment based on a monthly survey; this tells us what fraction of workers are unemployed. To turn that into a number of unemployed, the BLS estimates total working-age population; but it updates those estimates only once a year. So there’s usually a step up or down in the totals each January, signifying nothing.

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