Government statistics, like “60 Minutes” interviews and ABC presidential debates, tend to be inaccurate, slanted and subject to ex post facto revisions.
And yet they are consumed without hesitation by the gullible and used freely to make decisions from the political to the economic.
Why this is so – an ongoing triumph of hope over experience — remains a question for our times.
The government bureaucracy is particularly bad in being willing to massage those statistics to back up the prevailing narrative as espoused by the political left.
Recall all those job gains designed to make the Clueless Joe-Kamala Chameleon economy look stronger and then about 850,000 jobs got revised away?
More recently, FBI violent crime statistics were revised upward in a large fashion. You might remember from the debate that Donald Trump noted rising violent crime and was fact-checked by the moderators in their typically one-sided fashion. They cited FBI crime numbers.
The Trump campaign was quick to point out the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey saw a 37 percent rise in violent crime since Kamala Harris arrived in 2020 as vice president.
Now our unbiased FBI, the same organization that gave Shillary Clinton a pass on mishandling classified information, used lies to get wiretap authorization on Trump, and had agents actively exchanging get-Trump texts, has come clean on crime numbers.
That widely reported and cited 2.1 percent DECREASE in violent crime in 2022, now is a 4.5 percent INCREASE!
Not surprisingly, we didn’t receive official mea culpas from the FBI. That suspect organization just slipped in the changes and hoped no one would notice.
Whoops.
Today was a big day for government data releases.
Retail sales were strong, a plus .5 percent month over month, with the help of a “seasonal adjustment.” Without that adjustment, it’s down 7.5 percent month over month. That is the largest seasonal adjustment in history.
I’m sure the leftist bean counters in the bureaucracy didn’t goose the seasonal adjustment with an election less than a month in our future and so this would be their last report until after the voting. I mean, they can always do one of those magical downward revisions after Americans have made their choice for president and various other offices.
In another government data release, U.S. manufacturing numbers for September came in down .4 percent vs. an anticipated .1 percent decline. They couldn’t even seasonally adjust this away. But just ignore it, please, and vote Kamala Chameleon and Tampon Tim.
Democrats and their surrogates consistently say the economy is strong and those who disagree are either mistaken or flat-out fibbing.
They point to record highs in investment markets as proof. But stock markets are not the economy. Stock prices can be and have been inflated with rash fiscal spending.
Eventually, those stock prices can be expected to come in sharply if and when the sugar high of enormous governmental spending ends.
Crime is up – even the FBI now agrees.
Prices are up. When you hear about declines in inflation, remember that’s just the rate of increase slowing. Prices remain 30 or 40 percent higher than they were when Biden-Harris took office. Also, a 3 percent increase on a 130 percent base (current prices compared to pre-Biden) is equivalent to a 3.9-percent increase on the pre-Biden costs.
All these blatant errors and manipulations in government statistics give pause as we approach an election, with vote counting being the most impactful government statistic of all.
Sam Ross Jr's site 