Category: The Numbers Game

They are an obstacle to freedom… if you measure freedom by greater inequality.

A former executive with Sentry Insurance and Republican, Bernard Hlavac bought a half-page ad in Sunday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel outlining why he supports the recall of Governor Scott Walker. “I can’t think of a better way to spend my money than on this,” he said in a telephone interview from…

Congressman Daniel Webster (R-FL). But last week, the Republican-led House voted to eliminate the survey altogether, on the grounds that the government should not be butting its nose into Americans’ homes. “This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,”…

Yes, it sure is working.  Carry on, citizens, nothing to see here. At a time when government jobs statistics are under scrutiny as never before, preliminary data released Thursday showed that Wisconsin lost an estimated 6,200 private-sector jobs in April. April showed the second consecutive month of private-sector job losses…

Because who needs all that pesky data clogging up our faith-based ideological decision making process?  Governor Walker has shown us the way! On May 9 the House voted to kill the American Community Survey, which collects data on some 3 million households each year and is the largest survey next to the…

I am an interested amateur when it comes to questions of economics.  I have read a lot and talked to actual economists from time to time (I maintain a regular correspondence with a few), but I have no formal training beyond my background in statistics and social science and one…

Data has always been putty to be molded by propagandists into informational power.  Through the inclusion of irrelevant data or the exclusion of relevant data, these students of Stalin use the data to fabricate a “reality.”  They rely on the obfuscatory possibilities afforded by rows and rows of numbers, complex charts,…

First he campaigns on a fictional future, now he’s cooking the DWD books.  Will this man stop at nothing to cling to power? Gov. Scott Walker said Monday that Wisconsin’s job creation numbers for his first year in office will be revised this week, less than three weeks before he…

In Europe, at least.  France has a new Socialist President, François Hollande.  While the Euro traded lower this morning (no surprise), the opposition in Germany, both politically and to the ongoing austerity pact with France, was energized. Ms. Merkel’s political opponents, though, seemed cheered. Sigmar Gabriel, head of the opposition Social…