Like we already didn't know this
As if the average person didn't already know this from his/her struggles to keep up with soaring gasonline costs, heating the home, and buying groceries, but there is growing talk of the US government's economic indicator numbers being either inaccurate or flat out falsified.
The Intelligence Daily reports on an article by Kevin Phillips in Harper's: The article focuses primarily on three measures: the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the monthly figure for the unemployment rate. Phillips convincingly demonstrates that the real unemployment rate in the United States is between 9 and 12 percent, not the 5 percent or less that is officially claimed. The real rate of inflation is not 2 or 3 percent, but instead, between 7 and 10 percent. And real economic growth has been about 1 percent, not the 3-4 percent officially claimed during the most recent Wall Street and housing bubble that has burst.
Don't we all intuitively know that inflation is high? I see it simply by going to the supermarket.
What motive exists for falsifying such crucial economic information? The most obvious answer is political capital.
And if this indeed is true, then what can we do to protect the integrity of our information from political opportunism?
Blogs like this one and many others on the net try to give you tools to filter what the mainstream media tells you and step out of that zone of passively accepting what we are supposed to believe.
It would be much easier to live in a world where we can trust our media to tell us the unvarnished truth, but that era—if it ever existed—is long gone. It is more crucial than ever that we be critical of the information we receive.
Luckily, the internet and tools such as Google and YouTube enable us to fact check much more effectively than past generations could.
The Intelligence Daily reports on an article by Kevin Phillips in Harper's: The article focuses primarily on three measures: the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and the monthly figure for the unemployment rate. Phillips convincingly demonstrates that the real unemployment rate in the United States is between 9 and 12 percent, not the 5 percent or less that is officially claimed. The real rate of inflation is not 2 or 3 percent, but instead, between 7 and 10 percent. And real economic growth has been about 1 percent, not the 3-4 percent officially claimed during the most recent Wall Street and housing bubble that has burst.
Don't we all intuitively know that inflation is high? I see it simply by going to the supermarket.
What motive exists for falsifying such crucial economic information? The most obvious answer is political capital.
And if this indeed is true, then what can we do to protect the integrity of our information from political opportunism?
Blogs like this one and many others on the net try to give you tools to filter what the mainstream media tells you and step out of that zone of passively accepting what we are supposed to believe.
It would be much easier to live in a world where we can trust our media to tell us the unvarnished truth, but that era—if it ever existed—is long gone. It is more crucial than ever that we be critical of the information we receive.
Luckily, the internet and tools such as Google and YouTube enable us to fact check much more effectively than past generations could.
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