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Trump refuses to share pre-holiday inflation report — first skipped month in 12 years (www.rawstory.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/Finance@lemmy.sdf.org
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The federal agency will skip the postponed October report on the Producer Price Index and instead roll those figures into November's report, which will be published Jan. 14, reported the Wall Street Journal.

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[–] 26 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Withholding government reports or cooking them to make them more palpable is what we in the USA have accused China of for years.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

    we've been cooking the numbers for years, witholding them is just to finally pop this bubble

    dems ratfuck and build the bubble, take a couple carefully chosen social steps forward while ignoring basic growing wealth-gap/QoL shit leading to growing general disillusionment, lose to republicans after purposefully sabotaging themselves, republicans ratfuck more, pop the bubble, take a society couple steps back, dems win after, repeat

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    we’ve been cooking the numbers for years

    Can you point to an example I can look at?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (1 child)

    the dozen different times they've changed the inflation metrics to remove/reduce the effect of various "volatile" things that were...becoming to expensive...like food, and housing.

    and that's before you throw in shit like federal/state subsidies which are used to directly and artificially manipulate the price of goods for consumers, like for gas. americans hate paying more than 4$/gallon for gas, but they effectively pay alot more when consider all the subsidies

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    the dozen different times they’ve changed the inflation metrics to remove/reduce the effect of various “volatile” things that were…becoming to expensive…like food, and housing.

    That sounds like you're describing the Consumer Price Index and the changes made to it over time. Those changes make sense to me because at one time the money you'd spend on internet access wasn't included because the items included predate the internet. Once it was accepted that internet is something everyone needs, they changed the metric to include it. Further, all of this is published in the open. You can read all the docs where the decisions were made and when the new metric is reflected in the data.

    The changes made to the CPI haven't "remove/reduce"'d the measured inflation number, they've actually increased the measured inflation, which I think we both agree is a more accurate assessment of what American consumers are facing.

    This doesn't compare to China in the past or what trump is doing now where they are simply faking numbers or withholding reports altogether.

    and that’s before you throw in shit like federal/state subsidies which are used to directly and artificially manipulate the price of goods for consumers, like for gas. americans hate paying more than 4$/gallon for gas, but they effectively pay alot more when consider all the subsidies

    That's a much larger conversation that isn't aimed at lying to people or withholding data. Yes, there is a political component where consumers don't like to pay more for gas, but even that isn't the main driver. The main driver is businesses need predictable prices and much of what the US Government (historically) does is making things predictable, not cheap, but predictable. With trump most of this is out the window and he's breaking rules and screwing up the stable predictable environment businesses want and need.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago*

    I'm not sure anyone's been "cooking the books" on inflation. There's ample open source data. Would be pretty hard to cover it up, even if the government isn't releasing their own figures.

    That being said, they can distort things like unemployment figures by discounting under employment or people who have given up searching.

    As for fiscal irresponsibility, both parties are guilty. But at the same time, of the two parties, the Democrats are more fiscally responsible. It's a tired myth that this is not the case but Republicans are a "cut taxes and spend" party. And usually the way they spend is giving more money to the rich while shifting cost burdens to the working class. But since the USD is the global reserve currency, it's actually impossible for the US to not rack up debt.

    That being said, debt isn't actually the real problem. The problem is under investment in industries that actually lead to future growth and enable prosperity in the 65th percentile, as opposed to a system that just allows rich people to siphon money from the economy and then tax shelter it. Which is our current system. But I use the term "industries" loosely. I'm not talking about kickbacks for corporations. I'm talking about we need subsidized healthcare and education; we need to invest in more efficient, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure; we need to invest in the industries of the future rather than continuing to subsidize the industries of yesterday.

    The US does have a problem of a two party duopoly. And both parties are just the capitalist party, where the Democrats are the moderate wing and the Republicans are the far right wing. Democrats are not a left wing party, nor do they serve the interests of the working class. It's neither through incompetence or indecision that they repeatedly fail to deliver necessary reforms that would actually help the bottom 90%. But then, that goes doubly so for the Republicans. We have to abolish the two party duopoly and get money out of politics. That would be a good start.

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