Reason #51: Lies, Damn Lies, and Government Statistics

No matter who’s in the White House-Democrat or Republican-every presidential administration brags that our economy is doing great. That’s because if they started telling the truth about the state we’re in as a country, the American public might start doing a lot less of the thing our economy relies on almost exclusively: shopping. So our politicians work overtime to reassure us and keep us pumping money into the consumer marketplace.

But our elected officials know that just telling us everything’s okay is not enough. They’re aware that nobody trusts politicians, so they direct federal agencies to crank out bogus “official” statistics. And if the government number-crunchers produce figures that don’t back up their rosy outlooks? No problem. They simply tweak the stats or fiddle with the way they’re calculated until all the digits and decimals are appropriately encouraging. And, true to form, the talking heads in the media dutifully repeat the “facts” put out by the fiction writers in Washington.

I’ve already talked about the problems with GDP as a reliable metric. But the two most deceptive government stats are probably the Consumer Price Index and the unemployment rate.

NEXT: Reason #52: The CPI and the Myth of Low Inflation