Lies, D*** Lies, and Statistics ... or How They Hide the Numbers

It's depressing to discover just exactly how they make some problems seem worse than they are while hiding others using clever manipulation of numbers.

1.) We've all heard about the manipulation of the labor force participation stats. Labor force participation is at its lowest since Carter, but because of how they count the numbers and report them, we are at "full" employment. I'm counted as employed because I have a part-time job even though I'd really rather have a full-time one. But I've been stuck in my current status since 2008.

2.) There is no inflation, but anyone who pays astute attention to their grocery bill, and until recently, their fuel bill, knows how false this is. When the bottom fell out in 2008, we were paying an average of $2/item at the grocery store for roughly 50 items per week. Our buying habits have not changed. We purchase the same items, same brands, same amount ever week, but now we average $2.25 per item. But don't worry, they tell us there is no real inflation. Why? They discount food prices in the price index. Until recently, the didn't count the price of fuel either. Want to bet that might change now with gas plunging?

3.) Food insecurity. So many poor, starving children are food insecure. They tell us this to drum up support for social welfare programs like SNAP. But do you actually know how they determine if a child is considered "food insecure?" It's simple. They ask the kid if he or she knows what they are having for supper (or their next meal at home). By that definition, your own well fed child could very well be "food insecure" even if they are well fed and never have wanted for food in their lives. Heck, our son is "food insecure" and so are we. You know why? While we have ample food in the house for every meal, we often don't know right up until our meal exactly what we will make for it. However, we all know we will, in fact, be eating and eating well. But we're "food insecure" because we don't know what.

4.) Poverty. They changed the measure of poverty to be a percentage of the average or mean income level. So no matter how well off the poorest among us are, there will always be a certain percentage of us who will be in poverty by that measure. We could provide enough in social welfare benefits to have the poorest living in six-digit comfort but if they are the bottom of the totem pole, they will still be in poverty by the percentage measure and thus, poor, and in need of our support to lift them out.

5.) Homeless children. This is a new one to me, but my husband has a coworker who has relatives who in a trouble with the state child services over personal problems. Suffice it to say that if they do not clean up their lives, they could lose their children. This coworker and his wife have taken in their four children. As of right now, these four children are living in the moderately affluent, middle class home of a relative they've known all their lives being well fed, provided for, and taken care of by a full-time aunt who is working weekends and evenings so that someone can be home at all times to care for them. But due to their circumstances and definitions of the state, these children are now classified as "homeless" and added to that statistic. Makes you wonder about that number now doesn't it?

Numbers can be made to say pretty much anything. 50% of all statistics are made up ya know...lol


We have so many kids with food insecurity and have a childhood obesity problem at the same time.

a reply to: Bluntone22

Considering how effortless it appears to be to manipulate statistical assessments, it's no wonder why direct democracy, simple majority rule, is such a potentially unrestrained threat to cooperative society.

On the inflation part, they can change the items they choose to count as the market basket. For example they changed steak to hamburger and said the price of beef was the same.

They have taken 95% of the wealth of society out of day to day life.

The price of everything has dropped in terms of work time required to pay for it, and yet the price of everything has gone up.

The price of everything should have gone down by about 95% since 1913.

Average wages
1913 -- $800 per Year
2013 -- $ 26364 per year
www.moneychoice.org...

Price of bread
1913 -- $ 0.056
2013 -- $ 1.422
inflationdata.com...

Amount of bread that could be bought
in 1913 -- 14,265 loaves
in 2013 -- 18,540 loaves,

a 23% increase in productivity.

Prices should be lower every year.

a reply to: Bluntone22I think the made up percentage your looking for is more like 100% fixed.
Like all polls (which statistics is the results of) can be fixed or biased with an ease that most people cannot believe. Firstly you have to totally discount percentages as it's virtually impossible to poll the entire population so therefore you poll a percentage. Now what that percentage is is up to the people running the poll.
A pure example, the pollsters want to know how many people think that gay people want criminalising. Two polls, they ask 100 strict baptists and the answer WILL come back 100% for. Now ask 100 people at a gay demonstration and you'll get 100% against.
Do you now get it? It depends on where, who, what persuation (ie political, religious, race and even where they live) and most important of all the amount of people. All of these can be used together or singly to provide the outcome the pollsters want.
As for unemployment, it's not that they don't tell the truth, it's they tell selected truths and just omit what they don't like.
Ie. they don't lie, they just don't tell you the information that could be found out to be a lie. Is that plausible deniability?

a reply to: crayzeed

It's either lie by omission or selective inclusion, not plausible deniability.

I understand how it works. I took a class called Media Statistics in college and the very first lesson was that if you know what you are doing, you can make a number that says whatever you want. The number never lies; it can't. But the artistry is in knowing how to construct the question as it were so that you get the number you need.

The media is always full of numbers. Our own government is always full of numbers, and we are told that they say this, that or the other. What we need to be asking ourselves is "What question was asked to generate this number?" That information is almost never freely provided, and it might open a lot of eyes if it were ... which, of course, is why it's not.

This thread is NOT in recent posts.

Is that normal for rants?

a reply to: Semicollegiate

I never see rants, chitchat, and the like in recent posts.

a reply to: ketsuko

Everything you mentioned is something that is purposely obscured. In fact, that's just touching the float-silt of the entire situation.

We need to cast aside politics and clean our eyeballs to see things as they are. Unfortunately... especially in an election year, such is all but impossible for so many.

S&F - Keep it coming!

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: Semicollegiate

I never see rants, chitchat, and the like in recent posts.

I'm pretty sure I have seen a rant there before, although there are no rants there now.

Maybe rants have to get really big before they get to recent posts.

originally posted by: ketsuko
It's depressing to discover just exactly how they make some problems seem worse than they are while hiding others using clever manipulation of numbers.

1.) We've all heard about the manipulation of the labor force participation stats. Labor force participation is at its lowest since Carter, but because of how they count the numbers and report them, we are at "full" employment. I'm counted as employed because I have a part-time job even though I'd really rather have a full-time one. But I've been stuck in my current status since 2008.

2.) There is no inflation, but anyone who pays astute attention to their grocery bill, and until recently, their fuel bill, knows how false this is. When the bottom fell out in 2008, we were paying an average of $2/item at the grocery store for roughly 50 items per week. Our buying habits have not changed. We purchase the same items, same brands, same amount ever week, but now we average $2.25 per item. But don't worry, they tell us there is no real inflation. Why? They discount food prices in the price index. Until recently, the didn't count the price of fuel either. Want to bet that might change now with gas plunging?

3.) Food insecurity. So many poor, starving children are food insecure. They tell us this to drum up support for social welfare programs like SNAP. But do you actually know how they determine if a child is considered "food insecure?" It's simple. They ask the kid if he or she knows what they are having for supper (or their next meal at home). By that definition, your own well fed child could very well be "food insecure" even if they are well fed and never have wanted for food in their lives. Heck, our son is "food insecure" and so are we. You know why? While we have ample food in the house for every meal, we often don't know right up until our meal exactly what we will make for it. However, we all know we will, in fact, be eating and eating well. But we're "food insecure" because we don't know what.

4.) Poverty. They changed the measure of poverty to be a percentage of the average or mean income level. So no matter how well off the poorest among us are, there will always be a certain percentage of us who will be in poverty by that measure. We could provide enough in social welfare benefits to have the poorest living in six-digit comfort but if they are the bottom of the totem pole, they will still be in poverty by the percentage measure and thus, poor, and in need of our support to lift them out.

5.) Homeless children. This is a new one to me, but my husband has a coworker who has relatives who in a trouble with the state child services over personal problems. Suffice it to say that if they do not clean up their lives, they could lose their children. This coworker and his wife have taken in their four children. As of right now, these four children are living in the moderately affluent, middle class home of a relative they've known all their lives being well fed, provided for, and taken care of by a full-time aunt who is working weekends and evenings so that someone can be home at all times to care for them. But due to their circumstances and definitions of the state, these children are now classified as "homeless" and added to that statistic. Makes you wonder about that number now doesn't it?

You'll notice that progressives seem to be the ones who like to stretch the numbers or definitions to support their causes particularly when it comes to claiming people are in poverty or homeless. It is all about creating a crisis.

My other favorite is how they assume there is no upward mobility when it comes to poverty. So not only do they have an arbitrary definition of poverty, they also assume that people stay impoverished which simply is not the case. People move in and out of income categories as their careers develop. So someone who would be considered in poverty at the beginning of a career might actually be in the top 1% at the mid point of their career and then once they retire would be considered poor again based on income.

originally posted by: SemicollegiateThe price of everything should have gone down by about 95% since 1913.

Only if you redistribute existing money and labour over the exact same population. If you do not, money and labour accumulates in separate groups.

Firstly, we don't redistribute existing money. We print new money all the time, money that has not been worked for yet, so we have to work for it in the future. But the bankers are allowed to treat it as if it had been worked for already, as if it had real value. And because we all believe them, it has. But if you produce more money and the amount of goods grows less fast than the speed with which you print money) inevitabley the products will become more expensive (you need more of the money to pay for it). Prices go up.

Secondly: our population grew, so the need for products increased. These products actually ARE produced at much lower costs, but by the law of supply and demand, their prices aren't dropping.

Thirdly: greed. Making money out of thin air is a very profitable business indeed and if you are allowed to do that, you can do all kinds of magic. You will have HUGE power and people love that.

But there is also greed on a smaller scale: if you earned 10 bucks and had to pay 8 to your personnel, and now can have a machine that does the very same job, better, faster and without sick leaf - for 6, you simply fire the people, still charge the same amount for your product and stash the remaining extra 2 bucks in your old sock. "Nice profit" the economists will say. Sure, and if there is plenty of work for all, that's allright. But if there is not (as more and more machines do our labour) we create a class of the needy alongside the class of the greedy.

Simply said: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That's exactly what we see all around the world, even in societies like mine that, at least for a while, did try to redistribute money and labour.

a 23% increase in productivity.

Well, actually: you can buy 23 percent more loafs of bread with an average income in 2013 than you could in 1913. So, the correct observation is that the guy in the street has more bang for his buck today than he had in 1913 - if you just buy bread that is. On the other hand: guys in 1913 did not have to pay Internet bills, cellphone bills, car bills, computers, telly's, radio's.. we have certainly developed since 1913 and the average citizen has vastly more possibilities than they had in 1913. So, it's not all bad.

The nagging feeling is that we still have poverty in 2016.

originally posted by: ForteanOrg

originally posted by: SemicollegiateThe price of everything should have gone down by about 95% since 1913.

Only if you redistribute existing money and labour over the exact same population. If you do not, money and labour accumulates in separate groups.

Redistribution is what has happened. Without inflation wealth stays with the wage earner and his wealth accumulates. Inflation moves wealth to the recipients of the new money. The new money recipients are loan takers and government spending. Not the average man that the system claims to take care of.

Firstly, we don't redistribute existing money. We print new money all the time, money that has not been worked for yet, so we have to work for it in the future. But the bankers are allowed to treat it as if it had been worked for already, as if it had real value. And because we all believe them, it has.

Legal tender laws prevent a real commodity money to counter that. So you agree that wealth is taken from fiat money holders?

But if you produce more money and the amount of goods grows less fast than the speed with which you print money) inevitabley the products will become more expensive (you need more of the money to pay for it). Prices go up.

Yes, that is where the 95% of the normal person's wealth has gone.

Secondly: our population grew, so the need for products increased. These products actually ARE produced at much lower costs, but by the law of supply and demand, their prices aren't dropping.

But the prices have dropped, in terms of time worked to buy them, even though wages are lower and the prices have gone up. Hence a 95% loss of wealth in our system as compared to a free market.

Thirdly: greed. Making money out of thin air is a very profitable business indeed and if you are allowed to do that, you can do all kinds of magic. You will have HUGE power and people love that.


But there is also greed on a smaller scale: if you earned 10 bucks and had to pay 8 to your personnel, and now can have a machine that does the very same job, better, faster and without sick leaf - for 6, you simply fire the people, still charge the same amount for your product and stash the remaining extra 2 bucks in your old sock.

Until all of your competitors have the same machine at which point productivity has gone up, and the price will have gone down.

"Nice profit" the economists will say.

Lower prices for everyone, including poor and unemployed people.

Sure, and if there is plenty of work for all, that's allright. But if there is not (as more and more machines do our labour) we create a class of the needy alongside the class of the greedy.

Jobs come from business, if you want more jobs then make running a business as easy as possible. You assume that some given time has perfect balance of jobs to production. Would that time have been in horse power age?

There will always be temporary unemployment in an improving economy. But there will also be more wealth in everyone's hands and periods of unemployment will be as short as it takes to find a want ad, or start a business.

Simply said: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. That's exactly what we see all around the world, even in societies like mine that, at least for a while, did try to redistribute money and labour.

The redistributors take a fee, that is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

a 23% increase in productivity.

Well, actually: you can buy 23 percent more loafs of bread with an average income in 2013 than you could in 1913. So, the correct observation is that the guy in the street has more bang for his buck today than he had in 1913 - if you just buy bread that is. On the other hand: guys in 1913 did not have to pay Internet bills, cellphone bills, car bills, computers, telly's, radio's.. we have certainly developed since 1913 and the average citizen has vastly more possibilities than they had in 1913. So, it's not all bad.

The nagging feeling is that we still have poverty in 2016.

You would have 2000% more of that stuff without the redistributors.