“By the time you include all the monthly revisions and the annual benchmark revision, about one-quarter of all the jobs we thought were added last year have been revised away,”

“That pattern of consistent downward revisions has happened in two prior recessions. It is a result of market conditions changing too rapidly for the BLS to adjust their methodology, which in turn causes consistent errors in measuring nonfarm payrolls.”

There were 216,000 jobs added in December, with 52,000 of those being in government, bringing the total number of government employees to an all-time high of 23 million.

“If not an economic downturn, there must be something else causing the errors to almost all go in the same direction, and by considerable magnitude,” Antoni told the DCNF. “These patterns in the data clearly indicate that something is not quite right with the number crunching at BLS last year.”