WHY is the U.S. Bureau of Labor giving out such bogus, inflated salary/job stats regarding the field of Law?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't give out "bogus" salary and job statistics. Most people simply don't have a clue about how it determines its statistics and therefore draw incorrect conclusions about what they really mean. This a common flaw in general when people cite statistics. They either don't understand what the sources of those statistics are, or do understand and deliberately use them as a basis to promulgate misinformation (e.g. law schools) and therefore present them as proof of something of which they are not. In addition most people don't even know how to properly break down statistics and therefore cannot make proper sense of them, e.g. they don't understand the difference between mean, median and mode (everyone looks at mean a.k.a "average" as the most meaningful statistic to determine salary prospects when they should be looking at median and mode).

The BLS gets most of its data from the Occupational Employment Statistics which are establishment based. These are essentially samplings from predetermined employment institutions for each particular career area. In the field of law this has several fundamental flaws in presenting meaningful and accurate information regarding employment statistics for lawyers. For one it does not cover self-employed attorneys, which would include solo practitioners, attorneys that are not fully employed and any other attorneys who file their income on a 1099. In other words it excludes a lot of private practice employment information and probably draws the majority of its overall information from institutional employers such as big law firms, government agencies, big business and public interest groups.

Also the BLS does not compile industry specific unemployment statistics so it has no bearing in an analysis of whether there is an oversupply of lawyers in the United States although the answer is rather obvious.

EDIT: First of all michr you have to hit the hyperlink to the actual FAQ to get a proper url address from the BLS site otherwise you end up just giving the link to the answer to FAQ 21 that you posted instead of FAQ 17.

Second, the only employment information that the Office of Employment Projections offers is number of people employed in a career area, not salary and wage information. The BLS does not include self-employed income information.

what do you see as bogus?

the statement that the industry is expected to grow more slowly then the job market as a whole,

the statement that jobs will be available but with stiff competition and only the best & the brightest have much of a future,

or the statement that the average income is just $68,500.00 a year for graduates with the average for many jobs in government/court system being under $50,000.00 a year.

the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics does a good job of presenting the facts, they use real numbers and are unbiased in their assessments of job growth.

if you want "bogus" numbers look at salary.com and others of that type.

the Occupational Outlook Handbook goes in great detail explaining the requirements, outlook, cost of education, risk-reward of the career, working conditions etcetera...

EDIT:

actually the BOLS does include information concerning the self-employed

http://www.bls.gov/oes/oes_ques.htm#Ques17

Just glanced at the current numbers and they don't look that out of line to me.