Having It Both Ways

So Obama is having a problem getting jobs stimulus legislation through Congress, is he? Well in part it's a problem of his own making for allowing the myth of 9.7% unemployment to stand. The number is much closer to 17% and he knows that. It has been "fudged" by his predecessor administrations, including Clinton's, to avoid making themselves look bad, and he is allowing the practice to continue to avoid making himself look bad. If he let the real number, 17%, be used he would have an easier time passing his agenda, but then he would look really bad for "causing" much worse unemployment than his predecessors did.

But this is typical of what our executive branch does. If it does not like numbers that cast their governance in an unfavorable light, they "fudge" those numbers to make the numbers look better, to make people believe that things are better than they actually are, and to keep people "asleep at the switch" in the voting booth.

In a similar manner inflation, as reported, does not include housing or energy costs, because those items "are too volatile." In reality, they were dropped from the index because they were rising at a time when the executive branch of our government did not want to report rising inflation.