Special Report: The Truth About The Commerce Dept. Economic Report

[originalpckelly]

Is that a rocket in your pocket or a nice wad of 159 $1 bills?

Here is my report on this BS of an economic report. It is from the governments own numbers.
http://originalpckelly.googlepages.com/home

That website is from my podcast (once I finally get everything working with the actual podcast and download website I'll post the link for the Texas Death Row Report) Open Source, an open source investigative journalism podcast, which I am still producing the first episode of.

I did a Report just for this forum on the "economic report" (which I suppose has now become a synonym for propaganda.)

Please tell me if something doesn't work.

[originalpckelly]

1. Kick & Topic Title Changed to Help Readers (n/t)

[papau]

2. Good to see you are doing this - I wish I had the energy! - good luck!

By the way - the BEA is a treasure of facts that show Bush is a liar - as is the DOL

The DOL "birth/death" employment adjustment - where word of layoffs is assumed to mean folks getting equivalent new jobs which are just not yet reported in the payroll system - but where those new jobs are never verified by survey - so we have a cumulative birth death adjustment that just grows and grows as folks work off of the payroll tax system -????

This is a logical adjustment if zero'd out each year via survey - but Bush is not known of competence and I never said Bush was logical.

Add up all the DOL "birth/death" employment adjustments to date and you find Bush has barely added a million jobs in 5 years despite a major increase in working age population.

But our media pretends this is a great economy because the really rich are getty obscenely rich.

:toast:

[originalpckelly]

3. It is a good website, very statistics filled...

I was wondering why people don't research more. We do have the internet after all. It isn't as if we have to go the library or something.

Hopefully Open Source will help people out with research.

[Ksec]

4. Not sure but are they figuring inflation into their numbers?

a dollar doesnt buy what it did a year ago so if I get a raise of 2% and inflation rose 5% my raise wasnt a raise at all since it doesnt keep up with the cost of living. And do they include food and fuel in those numbers, I heard they didnt so its all hogwash since food and fuel are my most costly expenditures/

[originalpckelly]

5. You realize what my report was about don't you?

You and most other Americans probably didn't even get a $1 raise let alone a $159 dollar raise. That means the 22.2 billion went to the higher ups in society. In other words it is highly likely CEOs are the ones who pay increased.

Furthermore, the numbers that appeared on the news, specifically that the income of people was up .8 percent, were not accurate.

By saying income increased by .8% they didn't tell people that income includes people who are on social security, in fact the majority of the increase about .5% was due to increases in Social Security payments. People who work had an increase in income by about .2% or 22.2 billion dollars.

It is such a bad way to tell people about the economy, because social security income is not a very good indicator of economic stability, real working wage earners are.

[Ksec]

6. I looked at your site but didnt go through

all the links. I will later when time permits more than a quick glance thru. I appreciate your efforts. Good job .

[papau]

7. Food and Fuel are included - but procedure post Reagan understates

actual inflation. "Core Inflation" is always mentioned along with the actual CPI inflation increase and indeed is focused on by the media these days to tell us there is little inflation (a major lie). Core means excluding food and fuel.

The two major Reagan / Greenspan inflation procedure lies are:

1. Mixing decreased standard of living with actual inflation - the "substitution" concept says that while steak may have gone up 20% the consumer would have obviously switched to chicken, so the protein in the diet portion of the cost of living has had only the increase in chicken cost - presumably a lower number than steaks 20% in the example. So "inflation" is now reduced by how easy it is to adjust your standard of living to excluding steak.

and 2., quality improvement is removed from cost increases so a car that goes up in cost by 10%, or an average of 2,000 dollars say, but now comes standard with 8 speakers instead of 4 speakers, has the increase reduced by the cost of the extra 4 speakers - say 500 dollars - leaving a 1500 increase - or 7.5% increase in our 10% example. That means the car component of the CPI will ignore 25% of the increase in cost to buy a standard car.

Now "quality increase" reductions to the reported inflation rate began back under Ike in the 50's as I remember, as a way to hide how the auto companies were screwing you. But it went wild under Reagan as every little change was deemed a quality improvement that lowered the reported inflation. Clinton did not change the Reagan Bush procedure, but seemed to be more reasonable in its application. Bush 43 is back to maximizing this adjustment for political reasons.

A few DUers are excellent economists (I am only an actuary) and can explain this much better than I - and indeed they have calculated the real inflation rate based on the way people actually feel inflation in their daily lives.

In any case you are correct - real inflation is much higher than the "core inflation excluding food and fuel" that is reported in the media.

And since they decrease GDP numbers by inflation to get "real" GDP growth, our economy is really growing a lot slower than is being reported. But using the actual higher inflation to decrease the GDP numbers would mean Bush could not claim he was getting all this great economic news - this "great" Bush43 GDP growth.

[originalpckelly]

8. Kick for the afternoon and evening crowd. (n/t)