There must be 1,000-plus articles in the mainstream media now telling us the same thing. They say that the economy is strong and wonderful, with low inflation and low unemployment and high wages, and yet there is something weird going on. Irrationally, many people are unconvinced. For some strange reason, many people are still complaining.
People are so dumb, right? That’s the message. The masses are ignorant slobs, spoiled beyond measure, and cannot recognize a good thing when they see it. It just goes to prove that we need elites in charge because people are too dim to read the data and see the wonderful reality all around them.
This message is being broadcast all day, every day to everyone: You are an idiot for failing to recognize the glories of Bidenomics!
The truth is the exact opposite. As bad as people think things are, the reality is worse. At issue is the economic data itself. To put a fine point on it, it’s all lies. And it’s getting worse. Every statistical release that comes from the government is manipulated these days. It’s all explicitly designed to put lipstick on a pig or paint pretty pictures out of mud.
This is easily discoverable by looking past the headlines. Sadly, Wall Street rarely does that. Traders buy and sell based on what they believe that others believe about the data at hand. And that leads to a real paradox: Everyone can know it is a lie but still participate in it because doing so is good for the bottom line.
We only need look at the preposterous jobs numbers. This week, every headline was crowing about the glorious jobs machine of the U.S. economy. So much job creation!
And yet, you only need a couple of clicks to see the following.
Civilian labor force December 2023: 167,451,000
Civilian labor force January 2024: 167,276,000
That’s a fall of 175,000.
The employed population has fallen, too. The number of people employed part time is up by 211,000 people in one month. In short, people continue to lose full-time work and are replacing it with multiple part-time jobs. Nearly all of the jobs “created” last year came from the conversion of full-time work to part-time work.
How in the world does the federal government cover this up? There are two sources of numbers. One is the establishment survey that calls businesses and asks. If they pick up the phone or answer the survey, which fewer and fewer do, they tell the agency, but that leads to the problem of double-counting, obviously. But doing so yields higher numbers, which the Biden administration likes.
The other survey is vastly more reliable. The government queries households to see who is working. Here is where we see that labor markets are flat and nonperforming, revealing of increasingly desperate conditions.
As for the unemployment numbers, they become useless with low labor-participation numbers. When people drop out, they are not included. So the official data only records whether those actively looking for work can find it. Obviously, they can, but that says nothing about living standards or the well-being of the working population. At this point, it is a meaningless number, so of course the Biden administration and big media is all over it.
The same is true of the inflation numbers as measured by Consumer Price Index (CPI). With official data, prices today are overall up by 20 percent since 2020. The problem: Absolutely no one believes this. It’s ridiculous. Nearly everything you buy is up by 30 percent, 50 percent, or even 100 percent. Everyone knows this.
So how does the CPI manage this trick? It’s all in the details of the formula. For example, as the great inflation took off in 2021, we read that health insurance premiums fell dramatically and continued to fall.
What in the world? You read that right. The cost of health care has not tracked the overall CPI at all.
Do you have a sense that your health insurance premiums are down? No way. As it turns out, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has retroactively changed the way that it calculates changes in health insurance premiums and then fixed the data backward.
Instead of just calculating what people pay, they started calculating revenue to companies against the amount of benefits consumed and then assessing how much is because of price increases through a modeling exercise.
The idea was to treat medical services like fees at a restaurant. You spent more there this month than last because you ate there more. It’s not inflation. That’s more consumption.
But there’s a problem with this analogy. Health insurance is paid regardless of consumption. Yes, this is complicated by many factors involving copays and deductibles and so on, but the bottom line is that you pay whether you consume or not. It makes no sense to measure consumption against premiums because the premiums are paid regardless.
But by rejiggering the formula, the price measurers could pull a fast one. When people started consuming medical resources again in 2021, that would make the final price go dramatically down since people were not going to the doctor or hospital in 2020 (in a pandemic; make sense of that!).
Why would the BLS make such a change? It seems more than obvious why. This was an inconspicuous way to drive down the CPI generally. Mix in dramatically falling prices with rising prices and you get a flatter rate of increase.
Under official data, health insurance premiums dropped by 37 percent between 2022 and 2023. Right.
You can stop laughing now.
That’s only one example that we know about, but there are probably many more such manipulations in the data.
Then we have GDP data, which is nothing but a giant mess of statistical malfeasance. It is supposed to measure national output, but it includes all government spending as output, which is laughable because the truth is the opposite. You could implement full-scale socialism under this rule and generate wild increases in GDP.
Did you ever wonder how it seemed like the Soviet economy was growing so much between 1950 and 1980 even though it was clear from the looks of it that the entire country was growing ever poorer? This is how.
The same tricks are being used by the United States today. There is no honest data available anymore, sorry to say. The closest is the Census Bureau’s annual look at real income, but even that is affected by CPI fakery. The truth is much more grim indeed.
It’s a commonplace observation that we live in times of lost trust. I’m telling you that people have not lost nearly enough trust. There is still an assumption around that you can rely upon government economic statistics. That is simply not true. Like turtles, the fakery goes all the way down.
The reason the public is generally depressed about economic conditions is not because people are stupid. It’s because they live in the real world rather than the illusory world created by Biden-captured agencies that purport to report what’s going on to you. The public has a deep intuition that something is not right.
