Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
The brainwashing of America is just about complete, and it will soon be time to rinse and repeat. The latest load of suds to be applied to the task is the announcement that the gross domestic product — the value of all the goods and services produced in the country — grew at a rate of 4.1% during the second quarter of this year. The Industrial Hallelujah Chorus is in full-throated harmony, with every politician and pundit in the land agreeing that this is a very good thing, and competing with each other to invent ever-more-effusive ways to describe the economy — “booming” is just about everybody’s favorite.
The Tweeter in Chief has taken more than 100 per cent credit (as only he can do) for what he described as “amazing,” “historic” numbers. They’re not amazing, they’re not historic, and they’re not really numbers — to call them numbers suggests that they are data, and they are not. What was released Friday was the first guesstimate of a sampling of Wall Street economists of what they thought the economy might have done in the second quarter. Their guesstimates were then averaged, seasonally adjusted, tweaked for inflation, annualized, pasteurized, homogenized, whipped, shaped and polished until the magic number materialized. Continue reading