Free Republic

It's getting harder to trust Washington's numbers. There was, for example, the not insignificant matter of fuzzy health care budgeting. How it was possible for the CBO to budget six years of health care spending based on ten years of revenues is still a puzzle to me. There was also the little matter of restoring a 22% cut in Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement for physicians, a problem solved by shifting the expense to a separate bill. Then there was the odd coincidence of the autumn Labor Department jobs numbers coming in above what private-sector economists estimated they would be just...

As if anyone needed more reasons to doubt the data coming out of our government. Earlier today the Commerce Department reported that January retail sales data came at a nice and bubbly 0.5% sequential increase, and an even nicer and bubblier 4.7% YoY. This presumably beat expectations which were looking for a sequential beat of 0.3%. Yet here comes the much more reliable Gallup data to throw some salt in yet another economic data fabrication. According to daily Gallup consumer polling, which due to its lack of proximity to the government propaganda complex is vastly more reliable, the January average...