Michael Boskin wrote a great article on the manipulation of data in today's world.   As the saying goes, there are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.   Perhaps this article will enlighten you as to the various manner in which politicians can wrangle the numbers to meet their own needs.

Don't Like the Numbers? Change 'Em

If a CEO issued the kind of distorted figures put out by politicians and scientists, he'd wind up in prison.

•A commission appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggests heavily weighting "stability" indicators such as "security" and "equality" when calculating GDP. And voilà!—France outperforms the U.S., despite the fact that its per capita income is 30% lower. Nobel laureate Ed Prescott called this disparity the difference between "prosperity and depression" in a 2002 paper—and attributed it entirely to France's higher taxes.

•There is historical precedent for a "socialist GDP." When President George H.W. Bush sent me to help Mikhail Gorbachev with economic reform, I found out that the Soviet statistics office kept two sets of books: those they published, and those they actually believed (plus another for Stalin when he was alive).

•But President Barack Obama has taken it to a new level. His laudable attempt at transparency in counting the number of jobs "created or saved" by the stimulus bill has degenerated into farce and was just junked this week.  The administration has introduced the new notion of "jobs saved" to take credit where none was ever taken before. It seems continually to confuse gross and net numbers. For example, it misses the jobs lost or diverted by the fiscal stimulus. And along with the congressional leadership it hypes the number of "green jobs" likely to be created from the explosion of spending, subsidies, loans and mandates, while ignoring the job losses caused by its taxes, debt, regulations and diktats.

The manipulation by the Obama administration is pretty clear on a number of levels in which their campaign promises have either been ignored or broken:

1.  Transparency -  I believe that Joe Biden recently had a meeting on this....behind closed doors.

2.  Unemployment - With the stimulus package, unemployment would remain at about 8%.  It's currently at 10.2% and higher among the U-6 and U12 categories.

3. Jobs - Created?  - The books are cooked on this one.   I like this quote in the article about the creation of Green jobs and their distortions for their own agenda.

Rabid environmentalists have descended into a separate reality where only green counts. It's gotten so bad that the head of the California Air Resources Board, Mary Nichols, announced this past fall that costly new carbon regulations would boost the economy shortly after she was told by eight of the state's most respected economists that they were certain these new rules would damage the economy. The next day, her own economic consultant, Harvard's Robert Stavis, denounced her statement as a blatant distortion.

On the Economic Multiplier of the Stimulus Package:

The Obama administration claims a dubious "Keynesian" multiplier of 1.5 to feed the Democrats' thirst for big spending. The administration's idea is that virtually all their spending creates jobs for unemployed people and that additional rounds of spending create still more—raising income by $1.50 for each dollar of government spending.