Another Phony Employment ReportPaul Craig Roberts, Contributor According to the BLS, In September, 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force. These individuals wanted and were available for work, but they were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. In other words, 2.5 million unemployed Americans were not counted as unemployed. The stock market rose on the phony good news. Bloombergs headline: U.S. Stocks Rise as Unemployment Rate Unexpectedly Drops, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-05/u-s-stock-futures-little-changed-before-payrolls-report.html . A truer picture of the dire employment situation is provided by the 600,000 rise over the previous month in involuntary part-time workers. According to the BLS, These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. Turning to the 114,000 new jobs, once again the jobs are concentrated in lowly paid domestic service jobs that cannot be offshored. Manufacturing jobs declined by 16,000. As has been the case for a decade, two categorieshealth care and social assistance (primarily ambulatory health care services) and waitresses and bartenders account for 53% of the new jobs. The BLS never ceases to find ever growing employment of people in restaurants and bars despite the rising dependence of the US population on food stamps. The elderly are rising as a percentage of the American population, but I sometimes wonder if employment in ambulatory health care services is rising faster than the elderly population. Whether these reported jobs are real, I do not know. The high-tech jobs that economists promised would be our reward for offshoring American manufacturing jobs and tradeable professional services, such as software engineering and IT, have never materialized. The New Economy was just another hoax, like Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Iranian nukes. While employment falters, the consumer price index (CPI-U) in August increased 0.6 percent, the largest since June 2009. If the August rate is annualized, it means bad news on the inflation front. Instead of bringing us high tech jobs, is the New Economy bringing back the stagflation of the late 1970s? Time will tell. This article first appeared at Paul Craig Roberts new website Institute For Political Economy. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His Internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. 