The brazenly fraudulent economic data the U.S. government puts out each month would have us believe that inflation and unemployment are both pretty tame right now. Would that it were true! In reality, 'underemployment' is rampant, and, according to John Williams, a speaker at the recent meeting in New York of the Committee for Monetary Research and Education (CMRE), consumer inflation would be running at closer to 12 percent than the currently alleged 4 percent if it were calculated using the 1980s formula. Instead, we now get 'seasonally adjusted' unemployment figures, and a 'core' inflation rate, ex-food and -energy, that are about as believable as 1930s Kremlin data intended to validate Stalin's Five Year Plan. Productivity Hoax By egregiously manipulating the inflation number each month, the government has produced another statistical fiction ' i.e. 'productivity growth' -- a number used by "Easy Al" Greenspan to persuade us that the economy was on the right track during his tenure. If this were true, though, and Americans were indeed as wealthy and productive as the Fed chairman always liked to tell us we were, then why are there so many working wives? And why, even with all those wives working, do Americans have no savings? Oh, that's right: Our savings, and most of our wealth, are vested in the homes that we live in (but which are mostly owned by mortgage lenders -- the same homes that, on average, lost 15 percent of their value in the last year). Regarding inflation, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the monthly CPI number is bogus. Anyone who has been to the grocery store or the gas station, or who has sent a check to a college bursar, or had a prescription filled, knows that consumer prices have been rising very steeply
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