Government Statistics at Work!
Massage for number crunchers
By The Mogambo Guru
John Williams of shadowstats.com is quoted in an interview by Kevin Phillips in Harper's magazine, reprinted in the St Petersburg Times newspaper under the title "Hard Numbers" with the subtitle "Think the economy's bad? It's worse than you know; blame a half century of presidential Pollyanna Creep."
I did not know that John Williams had cleverly coined the phrase "Pollyanna Creep" to describe how the White House, US Congress and the repugnant Federal Reserve, starting with John Kennedy circa 1960 and continuing unabated and worsening all the way through to Bill Clinton where Mr Phillips' chronology ends, continuously came up with one stinking lie after another to disguise the horrendous inflation in prices, and rise in unemployment, that resulted from their egregious fiscal and monetary performances.
The article goes into such frauds as "imputed income" (such as the "value" you receive from living in your own home, or the "value" of your free checking account), the total of which Mr Williams calculates was 15% of total GDP in 2007! Wow! "Imputed income" was 15% of GDP? We're freaking doomed!
Such laughable duplicity continues into the description of the phantom jobs conjured up by the "Birth/Death Model" (which assumes that new businesses are being formed, and employees being hired, that are too new for anything to show up in the data), and the six separate calculations of unemployment, of which one of the most inclusive shows unemployment at a terrifying 9%! Nine! One out of 11 people in the work force is unemployed! Yikes!
Then, finally, we get to how magically to reduce inflation with "product substitution" in the consumer's shopping basket ("if flank steak gets too expensive, people are assumed to shift to hamburger, but nobody is assumed to move up to filet mignon"), continuing with the lunacy of the inflation-reducing scam of "geometric weighting" of the items still in the shopping basket ("goods and services in which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting for a presumed reduction in consumption"), and concluding with the infamous "hedonic adjustment", (which even the author says is "an unusual computation by which additional quality is attributed to a product or service").
It is this last fraud that has been used to such success by Mogambo Inter-Planetary Industries (MIPI), by which we commit an as-yet legalized extortion by utilizing the word "improved". The basic premise was outlined in the MIPI business plan, which is cleverly explained in our corporate motto, namely "Crappy products made out of cheap materials with shoddy workmanship, and passing the savings on to you!"
But before we ship anything a stupid customer ordered, we send a letter saying that the order cannot be fulfilled per contractual price since the product they ordered was "improved" before their stupid check cleared, and therefore the new price should be higher because of the hedonic adjustment for the increase in quality, and if they had some "problems" with that, then they could take it up with Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, ya freaking moron, which is who first came up with this silly crap. And if they still wanted their "Mogambo Ultra Blow-Up Doll" with the optional appendages and pendulous breasts, then they should send another US$15.95 in cash, which is their cost for the extra quality inherent in saying "improved" without having to prove anything! Hahaha! |
