Lying about US statistics: Bullnomics
The US government has been jerry-rigging statistics like the CPI for a decade, effectively lying to us about the financial instability of our money system. According to the government’s abandoned formula, we’ve been in a recession since at least 2007, but have been stumbling for years. So a governmental admission like the one on Huffington Post today is insulting to the middle class who work hard, pay taxes and struggle to get by, because they’ve been ‘hurtling’ for years.
In his book, BAD MONEY, Kevin Phillips says: ‘The debt the United States has been piling on in the last few years has provided only 30-40 percent as much stimulus per dollar to the national economy as did the debt added twenty-five or forty years ago. Why? Because money borrowed in 1970 or 1984 to be spent on factories, new jet fighter aircraft, teachers, or interstate highways had a lot more grassroots impact than money borrowed by ten thousand hedge funds to double the leverage of their various self-serving speculations.”
My read from this book is that Phillips says that the CPI is now made up of a strange mix of things to avoid showing that regular Americans have been suffering the ravages of inflation for years: Instead of counting in your mortgage payment, property tax, home insurance and declining property values, the CPI includes a formula for ‘what you could rent your home for’. It does not count things like increased cost of travel, food and living expenses but does give itself a deduction for the money we’d spend if banks charged us more fees. Its ridiculous.
We need a simple message from some politician that will tell the truth: “Hey, America? This is how it is. We’ve overspent. We have no money. We know you have very little money and that we’ve wasted your tax dollars. But we’re in a recession, have been for a few years. The way out is going to involve a bit of sacrifice from you and us. You hold your belt tight but also take care of your neighbor. We’ll stop spending on crazy things and we’ll make sure basic services are kept up and that we put all our weight behind what will get us out of this and so many other messes, GREEN JOBS. We’ll bail out parts of the auto industry, but only those who make and sell GREEN CARS. No more tax deductions for anything but GREEN. No more throwing good money after bad. That way, you can feed yourself and your family. The economy will have a boom. Global warming will arrest. We’ll slow our dependence on foreign oil. And money will flow into the pockets of workers. Where it will be spent back in the economy.
Buy the book, here: http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Money-Reckless-Politics-Capitalism/dp/0670019070
[...] can’t our government see? Oh yes, because they’ve been cooking the books for years, knowingly painting us a more healthy picture than really exists. They’ve said [...]