Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Vai a fidarti delle statistiche ufficiali

Breve storia delle manipolazioni alle statistiche ufficiali negli USA.
Da noi uguale o peggio e tutti lo sappiamo.
· During the Kennedy administration, unemployment was redefined with
the concept of "discouraged workers" so as to reduce the popularly
followed unemployment rate.
· If Lyndon Johnson didn't like the growth that was going to be
reported in the GNP, he sent it back to the Commerce Department, and
he kept doing so until Commerce got it right. The Johnson
administration also was responsible for gimmicking the accounting that
hides most of the federal deficit.
· Richard Nixon had a highly publicized war with the Bureau of Labor
Statistics on the unemployment data. Nixon wanted to report the
unemployment rate as the lower of the seasonally adjusted or
unadjusted number, at any given time, but not specify same to the
public. While that approach was unconscionable at the time and never
used, basically the same methodology was introduced in 2004 as "state-
of-the-art" by the current Bush administration.
· The Carter administration was caught deliberately understating
inflation.
· Systemic changes were introduced during the Reagan administration to
boost reported GNP/GDP growth on a regular basis. The wildest
manipulations, however, happened at the time of the 1987 liquidity
panic. In addition to intervention in the futures markets by the New
York Fed to help prop the stock market after the October 19th crash,
direct and heavy manipulation of the trade deficit data, under the
direction of the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, was used in
conjunction with massive currency intervention to help bottom the
dollar and to contain the currency panic at year-end 1987.
· The first Bush Administration began efforts at the systematic
reduction of the reported rate of CPI inflation, and worked an outside-
the-system GDP manipulation aimed at helping with the failed 1992
reelection bid.
· As former Labor Secretary Bob Reich explained in his memoirs, the
Clinton administration had found in its public polling that if the
government inflated economic reporting, enough people would believe it
to swing a close election. Accordingly, whatever integrity had
survived in the economic reporting system disappeared during the
Clinton years. Unemployment was redefined to eliminate five million
discouraged workers and to lower the unemployment rate; methodologies
were changed to reduce poverty reporting, to reduce reported CPI
inflation, to inflate reported GDP growth, among others.
· The current Bush administration has expanded upon the Clinton era
initiatives, particularly in setting the stage for the adoption of a
new and lower-inflation CPI and in further redefining the GDP and the
concept of seasonal adjustment.
As a result of the systemic manipulations, if the GDP methodology of
1980 were applied to today's data, the second quarter's annualized
inflation-adjusted GDP growth of 3.0% would be roughly three percent
lower (effectively netting to zero percent or below). In like manner,
current annual CPI inflation is understated by about 2.7% against the
pre-Clinton CPI methodology (would be about 5.7%), and the
unemployment rate is understated by about seven percent against its
original design and what many people would consider to be actual
unemployment (would be about 12.5%).
As to the financial results of federal operations, the application of
accrual accounting and generally accepted accounting principles to
federal operations shows an actual fiscal year 2003 deficit of $3.7
trillion, as reported by the U.S. Treasury, versus the reported cash-
basis $374 billion.
Poi si parla di distacco della politica dalla realta'.
Fenomeni di rimozione schizofrenica dei problemi.


purtroppo non c'è nessuna schizofrenia. Sapevano benissimo dove ci
avrebbero portati, e si sono fatti i rifugi antiatomici sotterranei
per essere pronti.