True or False: U.S. Economic Stats Lie

True or False: U.S. Economic Stats Lie

How's the economy treating you? Chances are, your answer is colored largely by three things: whether you're working (if you want to), how much you're making and how quickly your expenses are rising. Economists rely heavily on the same factors to judge the nation's health. At last count, 9.4% of the workforce is jobless. Compared with a year ago, the goods and services we produce are worth 5.7% less while the ones we buy are 0.7% cheaper.
Two bright people might see sharply different things in those numbers. To one, the shrinking economy is a healthy unwinding of past excess, for example, while to another it's a dangerous downturn that calls for bold government action. But what if the numbers themselves are something we should be debating? In the alarming view of a vocal few, America's economic measures are misstated -- rigged, really.

The accusation goes like this: Surveyors collect the nation's data and statisticians compile and report it. Politicians naturally want the numbers to show improvement. Not being able to change the facts, they focus on the handling of facts, pressuring statisticians to change their measurements. It's not quite one grand conspiracy but decades of minor ones compiled. Today's reports are so perverted, the theory holds, that the numbers have detached from
common experience.

Pollyanna Creep

If the theory has a chief architect, it is John Williams, a semi-retired grandfather of five living in Oakland, Calif. The son of a chainsaw importer, Williams sold the family business in the 1970s and began consulting for corporations, recalculating government economic data to arrive at what he says were more reliable measures, and with them, truer forecasts. Today Williams runs Shadow Government Statistics (ShadowStats.com) from his home. For $175 a year subscribers get economic data and analysis adjusted to back out the accumulated effects of what Williams has dubbed the Pollyanna Creep -- Pollyanna being the orphan protagonist of the 1913 children's book who learns to play the "glad game" to find cheery perspectives on life's sorrows. In other words, he provides figures he feels are properly miserable, to offset government ones he says are too prettied-up.

If Williams is right, unemployment is over 20%, gross domestic product is shrinking by 8% and consumer prices are jumping by nearly 7%. His forecasts border on apocalyptic. The government is creating so much new money, he says, that the all but inevitable result is hyperinflation, where "your highest denomination, the $100 bill, becomes worth more as toilet paper than money." Buy physical gold, he advises. Read Article...
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