Why go through all that bother when they can just lie?
This rotten bunch of government bureaucrats can be found in every agency. Just look at how they lied about medical care for our veterans. That’s about as low as one can get….unless it’s paying big bonuses from taxpayers’ dwindling paychecks to the employee who spent 2-6 hours on porn sites every day.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
[attributed to British PM Benjamin Disraeli]
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Numbers are easy to manipulate. It doesn’t take much, either. Add some here, deduct some there, move some around, mix things up with percents vs numbers, etc.
That is why some real ‘journalists’ and commentators look at the fine print and footnotes in documents.
One high up manager changes the definition of “unemployed”. Everyone follows the new definition. There is no conspiracy except by the leadership that said you aren’t unemployed if you moved to SSDI, haven’t looked for over a year or had 99 weeks of unemployment stop.
That’s a management decision, and the NYT can say there isn’t a conspiracy by employees. They aren’t lying, just collecting stats differently.
But we know the Obama administration does this regularly. For example, they changed their definition of insured during the Obamacare rollout/sign-up period to muddy the definition, so that there isn’t a clear change before and after roll-out of how insured rates changed.