Playing the jobs number game

ONCE upon a time and on another planet, a leading politician was bashing the monthly jobs reports issued by his government, which indicated that the nation's unemployment rate was down, as "phony" and a "hoax".

But then, perhaps this was a sci-fi film that presupposed the existence of a duplicate Earth in the solar system - Mirror Earth - where the citizens were identical to those on Earth in every way. That explains why a leading politician who looks and sounds exactly like one on our Earth recently celebrated the monthly jobs report issued by his government, and which indicated that the nation's unemployment rate was down, as "great news for American workers".

Well, this kind of mirror imaging took place on our own Earth, in the United States, where presidential candidate Donald Trump complained during a press conference in December 2015 that the Labor Department invented the then unemployment rate, calling it "a phony number" that "isn't reflective of 5.3 per cent unemployment, that is the biggest …