It's easy to use data to mislead; you see this all the time in organizations of any size, but especially in larger organizations - why would you expect the government to be the sole exception?
Would you say that the Kentucky government patting itself on the back for unemployment rates of 3.9%, while in fact real unemployment is at minimum 21.6%, is something other than the government lying about what unemployment actually is?
Being on disability - which is what this data shows - precludes you being employed 99% of the time. It also legally limits how much you can be employed.
The rules are complex, but for every $1 you earn you lose roughly $0.50 in benefits, until they quickly reach $0 for even a modest job.
> Fewer than 1 percent of those who were on the federal program for disabled workers at the beginning of 2011 have returned to the workforce since
That's an astounding amount of hair splitting to claim that the people in charge of governing - literally with the title "govern-or" - are not "the government."
I am describing how a democratic republic works. It is government by the people, for the people. There are government representatives, who if elected are partisan, and who are otherwise appointed or employed. The government of a republic is separate from these individuals and has an agenda of its own.
One of those agendas is publishing numerous economic data.
The individuals in service of the government and the media outlets that they talk to are where the proverbial cherry-picking takes place.
Partisan politicians and partisan media, not some incoherent notion of “the government.”
For example, it's been demonstrated that workers on disability is inversely correlated with unemployment: https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
West Virginia, Mississippi, and Kentucky all have almost 20% of their adult populations on disability:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/794278/disabled-populati...
Meanwhile, on kentucky.gov:
> Today, Gov. Andy Beshear announced that Kentucky set the lowest annual unemployment rate in state history for 2022 at 3.9%
https://www.kentucky.gov/Pages/Activity-stream.aspx?n=Govern...
Would you say that the Kentucky government patting itself on the back for unemployment rates of 3.9%, while in fact real unemployment is at minimum 21.6%, is something other than the government lying about what unemployment actually is?