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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Amy J who wrote (18928)	3/27/2004 4:54:18 PM
From: Tradelite	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

<<no one goes to jail for cooking the CPI and PPI>> You can keep laboring under the belief that someone is cooking these numbers, but you would be wrong. And I know I won't change your mind, but can't resist voicing an opinion here about something I do know about on several levels. I could go into a long song-and-dance about how I know the numbers aren't deliberately cooked every month, and how the system works, and how federal rules and regulations prevent politics and politicians from tainting any monthly statistics, and how difficult it is to keep a huge database operating in such a way to be both current and relevant, but why bother? I'm commenting only because I'm amused at how the American public loves to believe in conspiracies and dirty politics while it's paying a large federal agency full of hard-working people and expensive computer systems to deliver the best-available picture of what's going on in the economy. If you taxpayers can come up with a better system, or Silicon Valley can create one, why haven't you? I'd venture to say that those people who view the tech industry and computer servers as being ONLY the size of those used by one major corporation or two haven't even begun to realize the size and complexity of systems used by the federal government to keep track of databases the size of say.... the Social Security Administration or Bureau of Labor Statistics. Being realistic about those statistical databases and how they are measured from month to month might open your mind, but I suppose it's more fun to think that someone is sitting behind closed doors and choosing not to release any statistics which don't conform to the prevailing political view. People quote statistics left and right from all kinds of sources--many of them questionable and undocumented-- when presenting their views about the economy, the stock market and many other matters. Isn't it interesting that when statistics don't agree with personal beliefs or political views , the statistics are always discarded as not being valid? And yet the stats are trotted out as "facts" when they suit the occasion? We might as well trust the federal government's statistics, because we don't have anything better to go by. And do you really think the government can afford to revamp its statistical systems just to suit the current Administration or political party in office at the moment? If you do, you should be writing to your Congressional representatives and stop bitching around the office water cooler about it.