When things look bleak: Cook the number?
It is truly alarming when the United States Government resorts to statistical mischief! Common Sense University feels very strongly about this, after all, when the credibility of governmental agencies is in doubt and statistics are being manipulated for whatever purposes and we suspect political ones, then something is gravely wrong in America. Let us explain what we mean here. Ten days ago on February 5, the U.S. Government released its Job Labor statistics and declared that the nation’s unemployment rate by the end of January had dropped from ten to 9.7 percent. Even though, about twenty thousand jobs were lost, the total unemployment rate dropped which brought cheers from the White House from the President on down. To them, it was solid proof that they had turned the economy around and they jubilated about it.
When the announcement was made, we wondered: How can this be? On the one hand, we lose more jobs and send people to the unemployment line and yet the unemployment rate drops by three tenth of a percent. The given answer by the Department of labor was simple; they had enlarged the data base by 500,000 people who had not been included previously. When we heard that explanation, we simply wondered how this could possibly be true. After all, these statistics are being made public every month, in fact, some data is even being issued weekly. And now we are made to believe that this Department all of a sudden found out that they had underestimated the data base by a nice round figure. This is truly absurd! In fact it is even worse, this is a Department that has done these types of statistics for decades and now wants us to believe that a correction in the data base was required.
But we think that there is much more to this story. President Barack Obama has politicized his entire administration and we should not be surprised that a directive came down from up high: Bring the number down to single digits! We understand that this would be vehemently denied by the administration but we smell a rat. It would not be the first time that somebody has been ‘cooking the books’ and was in fact, told to do so. And it will of course also not be the last time when this kind of action will be happening.
The thing that is most galling to us here at Common Sense University is the lack of curiosity by the media. Is there nobody out there who wonders how this could truly have happened? How can one expand the data base by approximately one half a million points and therefore influence the results effectively by bringing a double digit rate into a single digit number and falsely indicating the beginning of a downward trend? How would it be if one journalist in America would ask him- or herself that, essentially saying ‘I will dig into this and want to fully understand the explanation given as to those half a million people added to the data base. Who are they? Where were they? Why were they not included previously? And who discovered this previous falsehood and now decided to correct the facts? We still have hope that there is such a curious person but only time will tell. We are patient and will keep on looking for that.
Looking at this from a personal perspective. How would the IRS react if an individual underreported his income by thinking that not all income was taxable? We think we all know how they would react. They would charge the individual and slap severe fines and interest rates on top of it. Why does that only happen to the citizenry and not the government officials, after all, they work for us or are we wrong here?
The final question we have is what will they do when unemployment rises in the country? Will they, the Department of Labor look for more ‘previously underreported people in the data base in order to facilitate a lower overall unemployment rate? Again, only time will tell and we will be watching! Yet the real question is: Can we trust the information we are getting from the Government?
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