Thanks in part to some fellow Freepers, I have been doing some research on the evolution of these government generated statistics. I originally started with how inflation was calculated and have stumbled into everything from unemployment calculations to the GDP calculations.
I have never been a conspiracy theorist. But if you had started planning a slow sinking of the US via bad data starting in the 1980’s fudging these numbers is a good start.
One startling discovery in my research so far? Newt Gengrich orchestrated one of the inflation calculation changes in order to affect Social Security payouts over the long haul. It was part of the social security fix (temporary) that was passed under Reagan. Another evolution of the inflation calculation now causes GDP to be overstated while understating the rate of inflation.
Most here know how the unemployment numbers are fixed and why those calculations have been changed.
It’s fascinating. I may post my findings when I’m finished here on FR for feedback and editing. My goal is to put it in simple terms so that even liberals might be able to follow it.
I’m not a statistician. But it seems to me that repeated revisions of the jobs number *in the same direction* month after month is prima facie evidence of either a) a bad predictive model in the first place, or b) data being deliberately manipulated.
Stastically, shouldn’t honest revisions go half one way and half the other?