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Pastimes : All Clowns Must Be Destroyed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: flatsville who wrote (39161)	6/12/2000 1:26:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 42523

Just did a google search - Crudele has been citing John Williams, an economist who runs the one-man Shadow Bureau of Government Statistics, for at least several months. I can't find a web site for the organization, but I see in an earlier NYPost column that Dr. Williams is located in Hawthorne, NJ. Sure sounds intriguing. Crudele says that when Clinton was inaugurated, he told his advisors that the Bush administration had been manipulating the economic data into the election, and Clinton wanted to make sure his administration could do the same. In March, Crudele reported that Williams calculated the real CPI jumping 1 percent, not the 0.2 that was reported. He also claims that PPI was up 2.5%, not zero. The BLS statistics were massaged using something called Intervention Analysis Seasonal Adjustment to discount the spike in heating oil and motor fuel indexes in January. BLS explains its technique: "Extreme values and/or sharp movements which might distort the seasonal pattern are estimated and removed from the data prior to the calculation of seasonal factors." I sure wish the BLS would remove the sharp movements in my own heating oil and motor fuel prices.