One of my pet peeves has to do with the government's reporting of the economy and its growth rate. I'm reminded of it monthly when the latest economic data comes out. Interviewing an economist's interpretation of these statistics on NPR this morning, he repeated the government propaganda that inflation is tame "outside of food and energy" price increases. He had to qualify the inflation index each time he referred to it by making sure you know it doesn't count the cost of those essentials.
I apologize for calling it propaganda, but when the government began tracking the inflation index awhile back by excluding the cost--to you--of food and energy, they began seriously bullshitting all of us.
But I guess inflation is tame for you, so long you don't have to eat, transport yourself to work and back each day, heat or cool your homes, or buy goods brought to your local store shelf by some form of energy consuming transport.
Look for the government to eliminate healthcare costs from that index real soon. That should pretty well kill all inflation. That is, so long as you stay perfectly healthy, shut your thermostats off, don't go anywhere and most important, don't eat anything for Pete's sake. It'll be the perfect life in a nation of Pollyannas led by a government that doesn't know shit about art, but when it comes to statistics, can sure paint a perfect picture!
3 comments:
Don't apologize for calling it propaganda ... that is the perfect word! What are the major cost-of-living factors in the avg citizen's life if not "food & energy", I'd like to know. Oh yeah, shelter ... how did they let that stay in the statistics? Better look real close as I bet they've fiddled with that, too. With that kind of skewed logic, once they remove all Defense Spending from being mentioned in the Federal Budget, we'll all be rich! Even tho I slept thru most of Econ 101, I still remember "guns vs butter". D.K.
Oh yeh, "guns and butter", that rings a bell. Oh, oh, then there were those two things, called, ahm, "supply and demand", weren't there?
Yeh, wasn't there something about "The law of demand, is the law of the land" too? I think that's pretty well been disproven. Well, if not in economics, certainly in politics.
Maybe not. Politically, as Americans we're pretty undemanding.
Yes, we should DEMAND our government SUPPLY us with competent leadership! Afterall they work for us. Let's send them to the unemployment lines. D.K.
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