Anyone who is actually on the ground trying to find a job knows that the American job market is bleak. But the statistics coming from the Labor Department (with the help of the Census Bureau) are not quite as dismal as reality:

This Friday, the Labor Department will announce job growth and the unemployment rate for April and — drum roll, please — it probably won’t look as ugly as the GDP.

That’s because Labor uses trick statistics when it gives a picture of the springtime job market. . . .

And even in this day and age of instantaneous knowledge of everything, Labor still guesses at how many jobs these newly born companies are generating. . . .

Of the 263,000 or so phantom jobs that will be added through guesstimates in April, probably 50,000 or so will — thanks to seasonal adjustments — be added to the “realer” number to produce the total Labor will announce.

Journalists and economists will report whatever Labor puts in the headlines without question.

And you know who else loves to use Labor’s unemployment statistics? Politicians. While Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth are celebrating the recovering economy and all the jobs Americans are enjoying, the rest of us trudge on in the wasteland created by government corruption and mismanagement.

The unemployment percentage is also an exercise in doublespeak. If you aren’t actively looking for work, you aren’t included in unemployment statistics. Unemployment statistics would be better called “Still Looking for Work” Statistics. It’s merely a metric of the percentage of people in the US who are still actively looking for jobs and have been employed rather recently.

The number of people giving up on the job market is rising. You can measure it by the rapid acceleration of government spending on welfare. In 1990, the civil government spent $200 million on welfare. In 2010, that number was well over a trillion dollars. Especially considering that factors inflation, that is a monumental increase. And those numbers will only get worse. And all the while, the information we’re going to get from the civil government will be all sunshine and dandelions. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.