You Must Assume That All Information Put Out By Our Government Is Corrupt

Francis Menton  December 21, 2022 @ Manhattan Contrarian

Throughout the agencies of our federal government, an important function is to issue data and information about the state of the country. These data cover a vast array of topics such as population, demographics, income and poverty, the state of the economy, the GDP, employment and unemployment, activities of foreign adversaries, weather and climate, energy production and use, and much, much more. The Congress and states use this information in making important public policy decisions, and the people use it to make decisions for their everyday lives. Not the least of those decisions is how to vote.

So is the information issued by the government basically honest and reliable for important decisions? Or, instead, is the output of official information cynically manipulated and corrupted by a government interested mainly in perpetuating and increasing its own power? And given that the federal bureaucracy is 90+% Democrat in political orientation, to what extent does that bureaucracy manipulate the information it issues to further the election of Democrats?

The evidence of data manipulation in favor of Democrats is so pervasive that we have to assume that essentially all information put out by the government is corrupt.

The instances of blatant manipulation of information by government personnel are way too clear and way too widespread to be ignored. What is now being called the “Twitter files” — shocking evidence of the FBI working with a big tech company to limit the circulation of information about corruption by one of the presidential candidates in the run-up to the 2020 election — is just one of the latest examples. Let’s have a review of some others:

Manipulation of temperature data to support the narrative of human-caused climate change.

Long-time readers here are undoubtedly familiar with my series, now of some 30 parts, on what I call the Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time. The headline refers to the alteration by U.S. bureaucrats of historical climate records to make it appear that temperatures have closely tracked the ongoing increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, when in fact the actual temperature readings show the opposite. The U.S. climate bureaucracies NASA and NOAA regularly put out excited press releases about the most recent month or year being the “hottest on record,” or something like that. But anybody can go to past information releases to find that those statements only hold if one accepts alteration of prior information to support the narrative.

My October 20, 2020 post contained the ultimate smoking gun: two NASA charts of U.S. temperatures, one from 1999 and the other from 2019, clearly showing the alteration of early-year temperatures to support the claim that the most recent years are the warmest. Here are those two charts:

In NASA’s data in 1999, 1934 was the warmest year in the U.S. temperature record, about 0.6 deg C (1 deg F) warmer than 1998; 1921, 1931 and 1953 were also warmer than 1998. By 2019, 1998 had somehow become the warmest year, through the magical cooling of the earlier years. And thus do we get a claim that there is some kind of dangerous warming going on that requires a full transformation of the U.S. and world energy system, all under the direction of the all-knowing bureaucrats.

Manipulation of poverty data to support demands for ever-increasing amounts of anti-poverty programs and funding

Look under my tag for Poverty, and you will find one post after another detailing how government poverty statistics showing high rates of poverty in the U.S. are used to support advocacy for increasing programs and funding supposedly to reduce the poverty; and then after the programs and funding are increased the measured poverty never goes down. We’re now up to well over $1 trillion per year in anti-poverty funding in the U.S. (all levels of government), and the official “poverty rate” as measured is right around the same place it was when the War on Poverty started back in the 1960s.

How is this possible? The very simple trick is that the government “anti-poverty” funding never gets counted when official poverty is measured The statistics are very intentionally and cynically manipulated to be misused to advocate for growing government programs and dependency.

The latest iteration of this scam has been going on for the last several months, and continues in the so-called Omnibus bill even now making its way through Congress, in the form of a vastly expanded child tax credit. Claims are everywhere, including from President Biden personally, that the expanded child tax credit has or will cut child poverty in the U.S. “in half,” or something in that range. A release from the Census Bureau itself on September 13 bragged that the expanded child tax credit had “contributed to a 46% decline in child poverty since 2020,” to a rate of only 5.2%.

But by October 4 the Census Bureau was back to its old tricks:

The child poverty rate (for people under age 18) was 16.9% in 2021, 4.2 percentage points higher than the national rate. . . .

Wait a minute — what happened? Easy — they keep two sets of books on the “poverty” rate, the better to manipulate the gullible and under-informed public. Here they just reverted to the other measure of “poverty” where tax credits don’t count when they want to run up big “poverty” figures to support advocacy for yet more government spending and programs.

Try looking through that October 4 release to see if you can find any mention that they were bragging just a few weeks previously about the clild poverty rate having been reduced to 5.2%. It’s not there.

Manipulation of employment figures in the run-up to the 2022 mid-term election

John Hinderaker at PowerLine yesterday has yet another instance of blatant government manipulation of official statistics to support election of Democrats, this one coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In early July 2022 the BLS reported a big number for job growth in the second quarter (April to June) of over 1 million jobs. That supposed job growth became the centerpiece of President Biden’s economic message for the midterms. The Hill quoted Biden on July 28 as follows:

Our job market remains historically strong, with . . . more than 1 million jobs created in the second quarter alone.

On December 13 the Research Department of the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank came out with revised figures for second quarter job growth:

In the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the [March to June] period rather than the 1,121,500 jobs estimated by the sum of the states; the U.S. CES [Current Employment Statistics, put out by BLS] estimated net growth of 1,047,000 jobs for the period.

Off by a factor of about 100. Oh well, it’s now December, and we’re well past the election.

Does any agency in the U.S. government put out honest information today? Maybe, but how would you ever know? At this point you must assume that that absolutely everything is corrupted, in the particular direction of supporting election of Democrats and further growth of the government.