WHAT a shame, and what a sham!

You’ve probably already heard that the US lost 240,000 jobs in October. That’s the shameful part.

And since the latest massacre in the employment market was made public safely after the presidential election, the Labor Department also decided to own up to another dirty little secret – it had overstated job growth by 179,000 jobs in August and September.

That’s the sham.

So the total decline in jobs in the latest count was really 419,000.

You already know my song and dance about the idiotic assumptions made by the government.

Each month Washington adds many thousands of jobs that it believes – but can’t prove – are being created by newly formed companies.

The logic behind this calculation – which is called the birth/death model – is as simple as it is extraordinary: even in a horrible job market and during a credit crunch as we have today, Washington believes courageous entrepreneurs are forming businesses and hiring people.

The October report – the one that reported the 240,000 loss of jobs – includes a guess that 71,000 of these uncountable, new-company jobs were created.

Included in those 71,000 made-up jobs are 7,000 that were supposed to have been created in construction and 13,000 in “financial activities.”

Come on! Are we really supposed to believe that a total of 20,000 jobs were suddenly created by construction and financial services companies, despite the fact that both those industries are mired in a severe recession.

Here’s a tip for Washington: now that a new president has been picked you can ease off the BS pedal.

But here’s the sham-squared part of this column.

An economist at the Labor Department admitted – and this really is news to me – that the 71,000 fake birth/death jobs are only the “residual” estimate. The bigger part, 70 percent in fact, of this guesstimate is baked into the larger calculation, in other words the one that came up with the 240,000 lost jobs.

How big would the overall job losses have been without the baked-in estimate for new companies being formed?

My source at the Labor Department says that number can’t be determined. It’s sorta like trying to find the egg whites after the cake is already out of the oven.

Well, here’s a suggestion for president-elect Barack Obama. Take the job of counting jobs away from the Labor Department and its estimators.

Because of modern technology, it’s easy to determine who is being hired and fired just through income tax receipts.

On that note, an outfit in Sausalito, Calif. called TrimTabs Investment Research says “the US job loss could exceed 300,000 in November based on daily withholding tax flows into the US Treasury of all salaried employees.

See, no need to guess.

*

Here’s some kinda good news for investors.

Richard Peterson, director of Markets, Credit and Risk Strategies at Standard & Poor’s, says that the S&P 500 index of stocks usually rallies nicely in the year after a big drop in employment.

Since 1953, there’s been an average 17 percent year-after gain.

For instance, in 1982 a 2.1 million decline in jobs was followed by a 17.2 percent gain in the S&P.

Now for the bad news. Nearly 1.8 million jobs disappeared in 2001, but that wasn’t good for the market. The S&P dropped 23.4 percent in 2001.

But the 540,000 loss of jobs in 2002 did lead to a 26.4 percent gain the next year.

Hold on before you start speculating what’s left of your retirement stash!

This recession could be very different from past ones. Lower in terest rates don’t seem to be boosting the economy. And government bailouts – aka rescues – are only digging the country into a deeper hole.

*

I’m hearing rumors that Morgan Stanley & Co. will lay off 10 percent of its 50,000 workforce.

And those given the ax shouldn’t expect a very generous severance package.

*

I know President-elect Obama has been pretty busy these past few months, but he couldn’t have been serious when he said last week that a fiscal stimulus package was “long overdue.”

Long overdue?!! The government gave $168 billion to taxpayers last spring in an effort to stimulate the economy and it did nothing – except make the nation’s gross domestic product look a little better in the second quarter.

Now the economy is worse than before – and the government is running up huge tabs that’ll smother an economic rebound when its time comes.

*

Why should farmers be doing any better than the rest of us?

The University of Illinois says farmers are getting hit hard by the declining price of gasoline. You’ll remember how so much of the nation’s corn crop went into the making of ethanol when the price of gasoline soared.

The university says corn should be selling for between $3.50 to $4 a bushel over the next couple of years if there is normal weather around the world.

The price had jumped to $8 a bushel when gasoline was around $4 a gallon.

Oh, well! At least farmers can eat what they produce. OPEC is going to have a hard time choking down all that oil that nobody wants anymore.

john.crudele@nypost.com