A comment responding to a recent article in Huff Post prompted my daughter to do a Google on Kevin Phillips and she landed on an essay he wrote for Harpers in May. `Numbers Racket: why the economy is worse than we know`
It's mind-boggling stuff for anyone who had naively assumed that govt. economic stats were authoritative. (How could they not be? The country's economists, the media, would surely never lend themselves to such a racket?)
So what do you think the US unemployment rate is? Around 5%? Inflation - about 2%?
Think again.
Actually the unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 & 12% and inflation is at least 7% and maybe 10%.
It's quite staggering how successive administrations have increasingly found new ways to cook the books. (Clinton's wasn't innocent in this.)
For instance, the moment you've been unemployed for more than six months, you no longer count in the unemployment stats!
Inflation apparently has to be underestimated because otherwise the rising cost of pensions, benefits, borrowing, and interest payments—all indexed or related to inflation—could join with the cost of financial bailouts to overwhelm the federal budget!
When you hear politicians talk about the "core inflation" rate did you know this figure deliberately omits the cost of food and energy and owner owned home mortgages? (What the hell else do people have to spend their money on)
This is an important article - I strongly recommend you read it in order to wrap your mind around the enormity of it all. Try to spread it around the blogsphere? How do we get the MSM to take it up?
Should Obama be talking about this? About what the real unemployment and inflation figures are?
The article: http://www.harpers.org/...
