With Labor Day weekend fast approaching, let’s talk about jobs, including the biggest one in the US — the presidency.

First, let’s talk about the half-million jobs that the US Labor Department admitted last week really don’t exist.

This is an ongoing problem and it needs to be fixed. But first you have to understand the root of the problem.

This doesn’t get a whole lot of play in the media, which is surprising because it’s bad news for President Trump, but the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last week put out a preliminary announcement that said the government vastly overcounted the number of jobs created in the US.

There were, according to the BLS, 501,000 fewer jobs than previously reported as of this past March. As I mentioned in a column last week, this means 20 percent of job growth from March 2018 to this March never happened.

I’ve been telling readers for years that monthly numbers put out by the BLS were a crapshoot because the government was relying on guesstimates. My personal favorite is the birth/death model, which tries to predict the number of new companies that are supposed to come into business at certain times of year.

So when the Federal Reserve looks at jobs growth to determine policy, it is essentially relying on guesses. And Washington conducts fiscal policy, or spending, based on the amount of money it thinks will be coming from taxes based on the number of people it believes are working. Companies then decide on future plans based on these guesses.

But the numbers upon which all this is based are guesstimates.

And while 501,000 missing jobs only represents 0.3 percent of the overall number of jobs in the country, the BLS’ mistake has huge ramifications — not the least of which is voters’ determination of how well the economy is doing under the president.

There has to be a better way to give people an idea of what the job market is doing. And the Labor Department, with its huge manpower and tremendous budget, needs to find that better way.

Let me illustrate how the BLS missed the job count so badly and why it needed to correct its figures by 501,000 jobs.

According to the BLS’ benchmark revision, the biggest mistakes were in categories called “leisure and hospitality,” “professional and business services” and “retail trade.” Jobs in those industries were revised lower by 175,000, 163,000 and 146,000, respectively.

If you look deeply into the numbers, some very strange things emerge. For instance, in February the BLS guessed that 39,000 jobs were created in the leisure and hospitality field by companies that were just coming into business and weren’t picked up by its regular surveys.

Now, that’s not a busy vacation time, is it? Why could all those leisure jobs been created?

And the BLS guessed that there were 15,000 more construction jobs being created in February than its surveys picked up and 5,000 more jobs in retailing. Why, you have to ask. Do that many below-the-radar construction projects start in the middle of winter? Do retailers start hiring thousands more workers than they are telling the government in February even as companies were failing left and right?

There will be another revision to these numbers in February and it could show that the BLS’ mistake was bigger than just 501,000 jobs.

The Labor Department and all the other agencies that handle government statistics need to clean up their acts. They can start by stopping the guessing games they play.