When you hear the economy created 150,000 new jobs in a month you hear a fairy tale. Once upon a time, your economy created...and they all lived happily ever after.

This is a fairy tale because too many in government and media use outdated measuring sticks. When they look at the economy they do. And using these old-fashioned measuring sticks, they come up with a distorted picture of our economy. A fairy tale. Which they pass along to millions of Americans. A pity, for certain.

The jobs figures you hear come mostly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It surveys mostly big companies. It surveys established companies. It conducts roughly the same sort of survey it conducted twenty years and thirty ago. It comes up with a new jobs figure every month. The fairy tale.

The economy does not work today the way it worked two and three decades ago. For instance, there are tens of thousands of folks who now make a living on eBay. They have created businesses, tens of thousands. Those businesses constitute jobs. Does the BLS survey them?

The economy churns out hundreds of thousands of jobs that fall below the BLS radar. These are real jobs. In softwear and small construction. In landscaping and home maintenance. In those millions of jobs the illegals are doing.

The BLS misses them because this is the stuff of small businesses. And because these businesses often pay no unemployment insurance.

Now, the BLS conducts another survey. A household survey. It calls people to ask if they are working. That survey tells them there are hundreds of thousands of new jobs the other survey misses.

So what figures are you fed by the BLS and media? The figures from the first survey. Which are impressive for the last several years. But the figures from the household survey are far more impressive.

Does this matter? Well, it can explain why the government predicts tax revenues about as well as a monkey would. It predicts what the consumer does about as well as you predict the weather.