…doesn’t mean that ‘they’ didn’t fudge the initial 3.5% for PR purposes.

I would put no amount of deceit past this administration.

I guess the administration was hoping the ends would justify the means. Unfortunately, the economy didn’t turn around on the original fudged number – and you’d have to be a fool to think it would. Incompetence…

and that should scare the hell out of anyone. Putting out patently false information to make things look better is the same thing as building a house of cards. I have no trust in the BLS to publish data that has not been massaged ….“If tortured sufficiently, data will confess to almost anything” (Fred Menger).

I do use http://www.shadowstats.com/ for basic information. I have no stake in the company, nor do I buy it’s products. But the basic info available to the public seems trustworthy.

Two years ago there was 95%+ employment. Now we’re down well below 90%. Some say we’re at 80% or lower. Are 80% of the people doing so well they can buy all sorts of expensive crap in quantities that 95% used to buy in order prop up the economy? The only people who are doing better than before are government workers. There aren’t enough of them to drive an economic recovery. People who don’t have jobs are losing their mortages, going bankrupt, cutting back. None of them are going to fuel a recovery. Every time the Democrats threaten another ham-handed intervention in the economy it will drive the economy down again, because businesses that cannot plan for the future will not make new investments. Businesses are going to go as conservative as possible with their plans, and those that are able to will move offshore to a friendlier venue. The result will be further job losses. As long as we have an interventionist regime in place, with “nudgers” like Sunnstein setting policy, the economy will accelerate its death spiral.

Doom, Doom, Agony, and Despair

The progress to socialism must be halted at the ballot next November. Every tool must be used between now and then to throw wrenches in the wheels of the collectivist juggernaut and bring it to a crashing halt.

“A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” –Alexander Hamilton

Study at Redstate University

Capital, the lifeblood of Capitalism, will do it every time. The rest of the two per cent increase is the result of the Democrats profligate spending, or a simple dead cat bounce off the bottom. Eighty per cent of the stimulus spending went to making four Government Agencies larger.
FDR created a twelve year Great Depression out of a normal two to three year economic downturn as the direct result of similar socialist policies for the United States while the rest of the world was beginning to recover.
THE OBAMBI wanted to take the up and down cycles out of the Capitalist Economic System. The result is a completely moribund economy.

Gloom, despair and agony on me. If it wasn’t for bad luck we’d have no luck at all. Thank you b.o.