Mark Twain on Lies

 Mark Twain is credited with saying "There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned lies, and statistics." While I like Twain's thought process, he left one kind of lie out of his phrase. He needed to add "government statistics" as the worst lies.

The news broke today that there were more than 800,000 jobs that were not actually created in the government statistics on the economy. The government had claimed that there were about 2.9 million jobs created when in fact the number was about 2.1 million jobs. What's 8000,000 jobs between friends? WOW!! What are the odds of that happening in an election year?

The problem with government statistics is that they don't actually count every person working. What they do is take a sampling. From that sampling, they extrapolate enough data to support whatever their cause is at that moment in time. 

Why don't I believe in extrapolation? Because I am not an idiot. If it's any consolation, I don't believe in the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy, the gangster Corn Pop or any other words that leave Joe Biden's mouth. I don't think that we know within a two-million-person margin of error, how many people have come into our nation in the last four years. 

The Biden administration was flying in illegal immigrants on charter flights in the middle of the night and continually denied it until they no longer could get away with it. Do I believe that they know how many people are actually working? I don't think they know exactly how many people died from COVID vaccines. Of course, from the government point of view, that was about ten thousand people who weren't going be around to spread the disease anymore.

I spent more than fifty years in the restaurant business, dealing with numbers is my life. If I wanted to determine how much business a restaurant did, I would visit it several times at different times on different days. Why? Because there are few places that are going to be busy from the moment they open until the moment they close. If a government agency like the IRS wanted to see how much sales a restaurant did, they would go visit for fifteen minutes in the middle of lunch on Sunday. From that sampling, they would extrapolate the sales data. It will probably only be off about 80%. 

This same extrapolation is how they get job numbers. Nobody actually gets data from every taxpaying business about the number of employees. In the computer age, how long would that even take? A couple of hours? They get a sampling from selected businesses in major industries and make up the numbers from there. They adjust the numbers to support their points of view. The real issue is that they just don't want to know how many employees you have, they have a bunch of other questions. If your purpose is to find out how many people have jobs, how many questions does that take? Let's see, how many full-time employees do you have. How many parttime employees do you have? A few minutes and we are done. 

I don't believe that the federal government even knows exactly how many employees they have. I don't believe that they know how much the national debt actually is. I don't believe that they can tell us exactly how much money they spend every year. I also know that they wouldn't tell us if they did know.

Years ago, the restaurant that I managed was selected to participate in the Labor Department jobs survey. We participated for about a year. The first month, i took a couple of hours and made sure that I filled out the form correctly and had reviewed all of our payroll data used for the form. It took a couple of hours to do that. Every month after that I filled it out in about ten minutes with whatever numbers I chose to supply that looked realistic. What are the chances that I was the only guy in the nation do that? I talked to a couple of other guys about it. I wasn't even the only one in Greensboro spit balling those numbers. 

The only question left is, "What else are they lying to us about?"