Growing Inflation of Absurd Discourse

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/17-1

How do the powerful keep the US population dumb and distracted? A key tactic has been using methodologies that produce totally misleading underestimates of key economic factors. First we learned that official unemployment figures are too low by a factor of two. Now, understand that the official rate of inflation hitting consumers is even more inaccurate. You will hear about a low inflation rate of less than 3 percent. In reality, it is closer to 10 percent, according to the highly regarded analysis by John Williams.

It is difficult for any one of us to have first hand evidence that unemployment nationally is really much higher than what the government says, even though most of us know people who are out of work or taking part time work out of sheer necessity. But when it comes to rising prices hitting our pockets, credit cards and checkbooks we have a much clearer sense of what is really happening. Gasoline prices have jumped more than 10 percent in recent weeks and for most of us is about a dollar more a gallon than a year ago or so. Some experts are predicting that $4 gas will soon hit most of the nation and, even worse, that $5 gas may hit us this summer.

Food prices are also jumping like a frog on crack cocaine. Many of them are masked by smaller weight packaging. Health care costs, especially insurance premiums and drugs, have also hit many Americans substantially and painfully. High inflation especially hits hard those people who have seen their incomes decline. Those on Social Security receiving no cost-of-living increase have every right to be angry.

The federal government is manipulating statistics to intentionally get a low number for inflation as well as unemployment in order to mask just how awful and unfair the economy really is. Political leaders in both major parties use this propaganda strategy, as if there are simply too few intelligent Americans to see through the lies. Sadly, they seem to be correct. And the mass media push the propaganda strategy by continually hyping and spreading the intentionally false data

More at the link --

[pinqy]

1. Since when is Williams "well regarded?"

No one has been able to duplicate his claims and he does not publish his methodology. After the last major CPI change, BLS went back and re-calculated the previous years with the new methods and found the new methods gave a slightly lower result overall (higher for some categories), but nowhere near Willaims' claims. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1999/06/art4full.pdf">Research Series Using Current Methods The thing I don't get is why it's assumed that because the current methods show lower, that the older methods are more accurate. Even Williams doesn't address that, just claims that because it is lower under current methods, that must be deception and never considers that the older method overstated inflation, which it most likely did. The Laspeyres index looks at the maximum bound of change, which is not realistic.

As for unemployment, it's only understated if you want to change the definitions to include people not trying to work and people who actually have jobs just not good enough. It's very difficult to justify calling either group "unemployed." And to get Williams' estimation of Unemployed, you have to add more people to the equation than those who say they even want a job. Which is outright ridiculous.