Fake Unemployment And Inflation Figures Sustain The Illusion Of An Economic Recovery

Fake Unemployment And Inflation Figures Sustain The Illusion Of An Economic Recovery

How do the powerful keep the US population dumb and distracted? A key tactic has been using methodologies that produce totally misleading underestimates of key economic factors. First we learned that official unemployment figures are too low by a factor of two. Now, understand that the official rate of inflation hitting consumers is even more inaccurate. You will hear about a low inflation rate of less than 3 percent. In reality, it is closer to 10 percent, according to the highly regarded analysis by John Williams.

It is difficult for any one of us to have first hand evidence that unemployment nationally is really much higher than what the government says, even though most of us know people who are out of work or taking part time work out of sheer necessity. But when it comes to rising prices hitting our pockets, credit cards and checkbooks we have a much clearer sense of what is really happening. Gasoline prices have jumped more than 10 percent in recent weeks and for most of us is about a dollar more a gallon than a year ago or so. Some experts are predicting that $4 gas will soon hit most of the nation and, even worse, that $5 gas may hit us this summer.

Food prices are also jumping like a frog on crack cocaine. Many of them are masked by smaller weight packaging. Health care costs, especially insurance premiums and drugs, have also hit many Americans substantially and painfully. High inflation especially hits hard those people who have seen their incomes decline. Those on Social Security receiving no cost-of-living increase have every right to be angry.

The federal government is manipulating statistics to intentionally get a low number for inflation as well as unemployment in order to mask just how awful and unfair the economy really is. Political leaders in both major parties use this propaganda strategy, as if there are simply too few intelligent Americans to see through the lies. Sadly, they seem to be correct. And the mass media push the propaganda strategy by continually hyping and spreading the intentionally false data.

“We have inflation now. If you go to the shop, whether it’s groceries, or education or insurance or health care, prices are going up for everything. The government lies about it in the US ,” said Jim Rogers back in June, 2010. It has only gotten worse. At this time John Williams has correctly described economic reality: “Near-term circumstances generally have continued to deteriorate. Though not yet commonly recognized, there is both an intensifying double-dip recession and a rapidly escalating inflation problem.” Wow! How does that compare to all the glib recovery talk by President Obama and just about everyone else in government?

In addition to banks and financial companies too big to fail that benefit the rich, when it comes to the economy plutocrats think it is too bad to tell the truth.

Who is falling for the economic propaganda? Gallup measures optimism about the economy as a function of age, income and political party affiliation. Worst of all are Democrats and the young.

Meanwhile the Federal Reserve keeps printing money to cope with the budget deficit and national debt problems, which is a major reason for the sharp increases in gasoline prices.

None of any of this, of course, matters much to the rich and powerful Upper Class that is doing just fine and buying more luxury things. And the fat cats on Wall Street and in the financial sector are giving themselves huge bonuses and salaries. Dr. Phil of television fame is selling his $15 million mansion estate so he can buy an even bigger one for $30 million.

Over at Ford, the chief exec recently received $56.5 million in stock and last year pulled down an additional $26.5 million in annual compensation. The latter amounts to 910 times the annual pay of entry-level Ford workers.

In 2011, Americans who make over $1 million will pay just 23.1 percent of their incomes in federal income tax. In 1961, the Institute for Policy Studies notes in its newly released annual Tax Day report, Americans who made over $1 million — in our current dollars — paid 43.1 percent of their incomes to the IRS. That was when the middle class was prospering.

If congressional Republicans get their way, the middle class will feel considerable pain from program-cutting tactics to curb the national debt, while the rich Upper Class gets more tax breaks and keeps sapping the wealth of the nation as Democrats lack the courage to fight hard for increasing their taxes. With rising economic inequality the US is rapidly becoming a two-class society: 20 percent rich and 80 percent poor.

Meanwhile, whenever I listen to Obama and congressional leaders it is like watching a skit on Saturday Night Live or the Daily Show. They are that absurd.

How many more millions of Americans must experience more pain and suffering, go hungry, lose their homes, lose their jobs, postpone retirement, and go without decent health care before the public snaps out of their stupor? Not that there is very much optimism among Americans. In a University of Michigan March survey just 11 percent expect inflation-adjusted income gains during the year ahead, barely above the all-time low of 8 percent in 1980, and only 21 percent expect the economy to improve over the coming year. But where is the loud political outrage? Loud enough to scare the hell out of politicians and the rich.

When will Americans rise up as those in Tunisia and Egypt did and before that in former Soviet-bloc nations and tear down their corrupt and dysfunctional government?

Unemployment at 20 percent, inflation at 10 percent, a multi-trillion dollar national debt, and nothing but lies from politicians. Have you had enough? Do you still believe that voting in different Republicans or Democrats will fix things?

if you look at the reported unemployment numbers, they have also cheated on those. The numbers behind their calculations show that the working age population has increased by over 6 million over the past two years, but the available labor force has dropped about a million.

Quite obviously the available labor has actually increased by several million, so they are under reporting unemployment by several percent, even if you ignore all those part time workers who are underemployed!

What crap.

Everything would be so much better if we just taxed “the rich” more... Bla, bla, bla...

We could take everything “the rich” have and the government would still be running in the red.

Screw these people that are constantly trying to blame successful productive people for all the economic problems we have today. Most of our problems today are due to people who think they are entitled to others hard work instead of pulling their own weight.

Yes, we don't have government spokesmen any more. We have dispatches from the Ministry of Truth.

Even though the USSR is no more, we still have this in China btw. They have a totally hollowed out potemkin economy that will shock everyone when it collapses, probably before ours does.

Do you still believe that voting in different Republicans or Democrats will fix things?

Name a third party that has the apparatus to give either of the other two a run for it's money? I'm waiting...

You see, that isn't the solution, either. It's a false dichotomy. The solution isn't Democrat/Republican vs. Something else. Who knows what the solution is? It's probably hopeless because of how tribal we've all become. Laments for a third party are unrealistic. We're only further fragmenting and balkanizing ourselves each day.

Americans need to come together and do the right things if we are going to get out of this mess. If we can't do that, we're done for. It's that simple.

“Yes, enumployment is 20% in this nation. Twice what they will admit.”

The numbers the government puts out there have no credibility at all; everyone can see they are a sham. One hundred years ago people could be mislead by convincing themselves that the bad conditions they were seeing must not be widespread; now technology lets us know otherwise. Lying to the people will not get the Kenyan Pirate re-elected; most people know they are worse off than 30 months ago, regardless of what the TV says.

There is a very real conflict of interest in having the government publish inflation numbers; if the true numbers were used, the costs of current Social Security recipients would skyrocket to adjust for it. All of the prices that we see rising could only be offset by the fall of home prices; hardly an indication of “no inflation”.

People can always vote for members of either party that truly represent them, and against members of either party that don’t. The Dems lose in this arrangement because when the votes really matter, their members toe the party line and support the socialist agenda of their leadership (see Stupak, for example). Repubs who support big spending should be tossed as quickly as Dems who do, and if TEA Party candidates can be supported in primaries they should be.

“Need some wage inflation to kick in too or soon even the people with jobs will be broke.”

Unfortunately wage deflation seems to be the trend. Most of the unemployed people I know find jobs 1/3 to 1/2 of what they made before. People who have held on to jobs have not had an increase in several years and have seen an increasing share of escalating health care costs passed on to them by their employer. For exempt white collar workers, working hours also continue to rise as they take on the jobs of their coworkers terminated in waves of downsizings.

The CEO’s and executives of major corporations are playing into Obama’s class warfare game by continuing to award themselves outrageous (by historical standards) compensation while making the working environment more and more oppressive everyday. I’m hearing more and more middle class people who believed in the system and are now crushed by declining personal income and rising inflation, plus the ever present fear of unemployment, complaining about executive greed and Republican policies. What is left of the middle class is losing faith in the capitalist system due to the behavior of the leaders of the private sector.

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