We used to be one of the few people around who went after Bush's Commerce and Labor Depts, as well as his politicized Budget Office and GAO, for playing numbers games. One of their favorites was to report pretty good (or, by the end, not gawd-awful) numbers for unemployment, the trade deficit, jobs created, jobs lost, and so on. Again and again and again we would be given positive numbers only to watch them be "revised" toward much more honest - or at least less dishonest - and worse negatives after a few weeks, and then, after a few weeks more, "revised" again until their endpoint was nowhere near their starting point. It happened too often to be co-incidence. It was clearly a deliberate attempt to mislead the public by using numbers to lie about the real situation.
Third-quarter growth was significantly weaker than previously reported, the government announced Tuesday. As measured by gross domestic product, which is seen by many as an increasingly flawed gauge that overstates the health of the economy, the revision showed that growth was still well into positive territory compared with four previous quarters of negative growth.
The initial estimate in October for annualized third-quarter GDP growth was an encouraging 3.5%. Last month, that figure was revised downward to 2.8%. Today, the figure was again revised downward by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, this time to 2.2%. This was well below the experts' consensus of 2.7%, and below the level that even the most pessimistic expert had predicted.
Of that 2.2% increase in GDP, 1.45% came from the administration's Cash-for-Clunkers program, which provided $3 billion in consumer subsidies for buying new, more fuel-efficient cars. Adjusted for inflation, GDP this year is down 2.8% over 2008.
This is not, as Digby says, good. But it's not just the numbers that alone concern me (although of course they do; they suggest that the so-called "recovery" is about an inch deep and not liable to benefit anybody except bankers and the investment class for years - and that's the upside) but the way they were treated. It is all so achingly, depressingly familiar.
This double-downward revision to bedrock numbers significantly poorer than the original statements for the press made them out to be is an old Bush trick, and seeing it coming from the Obama Admin is as disappointing as finding out that Rembrandt you found at a tag sale and thought was going to make you rich is really a Harry Rembrandt. From Schenectady.
If the Obama Admin is going to start playing the same phony numbers games that Bush/Rove played, then we can't trust him about anything. He's just another Bush, playing games with our lives for political reasons. I don't think I can take two in a row....
Merry fuckin Christmas.
Merry fucking Christmas to you too, Mick. It's as bad as you predicted, as impossible for these lying sacks of crap to fix as you knew it would be and so much worse. I'm afraid our lives have even less value to politicians now than they did under Bush, but I'm not sure because I can't seem to find accurate numbers!! I wouldn't be surprised if there were charts determining how many millions of us could actually go to hell before politicians even had to notice. Jackasses.
PS You got me to type fuck... twice!
Posted by: vwclown | December 23, 2009 at 02:28 AM
I wouldn't be surprised if there were charts determining how many millions of us could actually go to hell before politicians even had to notice.
You can't find them because they're secret, protected under "national security" rules like all bad news.
You got me to type fuck... twice!
Fuck. I'm such a bad influence on you I'm fuckin depressed.
Posted by: mick | December 26, 2009 at 05:32 PM