Don’t Like the Numbers? Change ‘Em; If a CEO issued the kind of distorted
figures put out by politicians and scientists, he’d wind up in prison, Ex-Bush Economic Advisors CEO,
Michael Boskin, slams politicians for cooking the economic books to obfuscate economic conditions.
Politicians and scientists who don’t like what their data show lately have simply taken to changing the
numbers. They believe that their end—socialism, global climate regulation, health-care legislation,
repudiating debt commitments, la gloire française—justifies throwing out even minimum standards of
accuracy. It appears that no numbers are immune: not GDP, not inflation, not budget, not job or cost
estimates, and certainly not temperature. A CEO or CFO issuing such massaged numbers would land in
jail…
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There is historical precedent for a “socialist GDP.” When President George H.W. Bush sent me to
help Mikhail Gorbachev with economic reform, I found out that the Soviet statistics office kept two sets of
books: those they published, and those they actually believed (plus another for Stalin when he was alive)..
America has not been immune from this dangerous numbers game. Every president is guilty of
spinning unpleasant statistics. President Richard Nixon even thought there was a conspiracy against him
at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But President Barack Obama has taken it to a new level. His laudable
attempt at transparency in counting the number of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus bill has
degenerated into farce and was just junked this week.
The administration has introduced the new notion of “jobs saved” to take credit where none was ever
taken before. It seems continually to confuse gross and net numbers…
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