While Jack Welch complains that the jobs numbers are cooked, Lance Roberts – a conservative economist and financial radio talk show host in Houston – has done a deeper dive into the outrageous criteria that goes into being counted as “unemployed” only to  discover that President Bill Clinton is behind skewing the data.

After writing “Why The Real Unemployment Rate Is 16.9%,” Roberts began to look into how and when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) became, well, BS, and lo and behold, he discovered, “In 1994, under the Clinton Administration, the Bureau Of Labor Statistics (BLS) changed the methods in which it calculated the levels of unemployment in the U.S.,” he says, “dropping almost 600,000 people off the unemployment roster by not counting those that are considered to be ‘Not In Labor Force,’ or NILFs – appropriately for Clinton.”

In his blog post, Roberts argues that: “(P)rior to 1994, persons were not asked whether they had searched for work recently. If they gave one of the five ‘discouraged worker’ reasons for not looking for work in the past 4 weeks, they were assumed to have ‘given up’ the search for work, although they weren’t asked when they had last looked. As a result of the greater specificity introduced in 1994, the number of discouraged workers was cut approximately in half from about 1.1 million in 1993 to 500,000 in 1994.”

“While the official U-3 rate of unemployment is 7.8 percent,” Roberts adds, “the less discussed alternate U-6 rate remains at 14.7 percent and the adjusted number of unemployed individuals now approaches 22 percent.”

This post was originally published at The Daily Caller and is reproduced here with permission.