I suspect you are completely correct. I hadn't really considered the origins of that sort of trickery, but it does make sense as a means to constantly run interference and confound meaningful data collection.
hmm.... "April 23 (Reuters) - Vice President Joe Biden predicted on Friday the U.S. economy would create 100,000 to 200,000 jobs next month, with a rise to 250,000 to 500,000 jobs per month soon afterward, according to a press pool report."
How do you create private sector jobs. Americans cannot compete against someone in china making 87 cents an hour or a white collar engineer in india making 1.57 an hour. Nothing the government nor future president can change that.
Lower corporate income taxes. Take other measures to reduce taxes/excessive regulations and cut wasteful spending. There are still plenty of things that can't be done better and more efficiently in the U.S.--with the right conditions. Focus on those things and let China, India, Vietnam, etc. do what they do best. The problem is that we're taking the exact opposite measures that we should. But we do have Paul McCartney serenading our First "Lady" so I guess it's all OK....
Ronnie Rayguns blazed the trail to destroy the working class. I was there to watch it happen so go sell your story someplace else.
I have no idea. We haven't had anything close to that. Artificially-lowered interest rates, forced loans to the non-creditworthy, Fannie, Freddie, etc. all came from the top and were forced into the marketplace. These set up the pre-conditions of what happened in the housing/credit markets.
And who set that up, some working stiff? Hardly! Who made all the money off that scam? Sure as hell wasn't some guy running a punch press.
It's not the governments job to create jobs or to figure out to compete against low-wage labor in other countries. It's the government's job to get the hell out the way so that American entrepreneurs can figure out to do it. Where do you think Apple Computer and Google came from, or Microsoft for that matter? You think the government created those companies and the thousands of jobs that those companies created as they grew? Even Hewlett-Packard was started by a couple of guys in a garage in California. If the government had any smarts, they would try to make conditions as favorable as possible for new companies to start, and get the hell out the way. Good ol'America ingenuity is the answer to our woes, not more government.
You can lower corporate incometaxes to 0 but that would not help. You still cannot beat 87 cents an hour for blue collar jobs in china and 1.50-1.80 for white collar jobs in india etc.. And on top of that you then have to rebuild our hollowed out industrial base. why bother? 87 cents an hour is unbeatable. Taxes of 0 will not bring jobs back, it is impossible to compete with those wages. And I am not saying for the government to create jobs, that would not make sense. The fact is 87 cents an hour blue collar, 1.50-1.80 white collar overseas is unbeatable. no one can fix this not the government nor anyone else. And to add insult to injury kids now have to blow 4 years in college and spend 50K to get a work permit. a 100,000 dollar Cisco enterprise switch is made in mexico for example.