I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey. Not once. If their methodology is built on that + unemployment data from State Unemployment agencies + data from payroll processors, anyone not collecting state unemployment benefits is invisible to the system, and half of the payroll is actually not even consituted of U.S. Citizens.

Admittedly, if I could find a single instance of someone willing to vouch or share insight on having filled out a BLS survey, that'd cure a healthy chunk of skepticism. There's still be the other distortions in the data to account for, but I'd at least have an instance proving that yeah, there is somebody filling out these surveys and it isn't just something they say they do to make their magic unemployment number sound legit.

Note, I'm in a massive sceptical shit phase at the moment. Last decade has burned my optimism hard. So when it comes to my ability to assume benevolent intent right now, there's a heavy bias against doing it, and a heavier bias in the direction of "what would be the easiest way to keep the System limping along?" The answer to that is "say you do one thing, in reality do another, and as long as no one comes lookin', it's gold." The finance industry runs on Trust moreso than anything else, and there ain't much to be said for Trusting anything you can't verify these days. Not from other humans.

I can't tell if you are serious or not. Lets assume for a moment that there was once a benefit to BLS survey methodology ( I would argue otherwise, but w/e ). Is it a good methodology today?

So my main argument ( and frankly the only argument that should matter ) is that is a bad fit for the goal of estimating values ( even though we do know its failure modes ). Is that not enough?