How to Lie With Statistics

So the big economic news of the day is that the unemployment rate surprisingly fell in January to 9.7% from 10% in December. But did it really? This is a seasonally adjusted number and the unadjusted number shows that unemployment went from 9.7% in December to a whopping 10.6% in January. The unadjusted U-6 (includes those only marginally attached to the workforce and those only working part time because they couldn't find full time jobs) went from 17.1% to 18%. Basically, unemployment is the highest its been and is only shown to be falling because of statistical adjustments (the reasoning is that historically the holidays are a busier time and so 0nce they are over people get let go so the BLS tries to adjust for that, but its clearly not an exact science).