Statistics in the Bush Era

For example, the Ministry of Plenty's forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at one-hundred-and-forty-five million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions.

The Administration announced recently that inflation was at zero for the month of February. I didn't believe it.

In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than one-hundred-and-forty-five millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all.

Earlier, they had reported that unemployment had dropped even though 63,000 Americans had lost their jobs in February alone. I laughed that people were stupid enough to believe that.

Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain. ~ 1984

Every statistic reported out of the Bush Administration is a fantasy. Soldiers mortally wounded in Iraq who don't die until they reach German hospitals are not counted as fatalities. The shopping basket used to calculate the CPI is continually adjusted to mask inflation. The real unemployment numbers are at least twice what is officially reported. It has been a long standing government tradition to tweak numbers but the gap between official statistics and the truth has never been greater.

Ours is a government supported by a scaffold of lies. From the beginning (the Florida vote count) through the run up to war to the current economic depression the only obvious truth have been the lies. Sometimes bold, often earnest, occasionally confoundingly brazen the lies are too numerous to count. That frequency has become the Administration's strength. It is less exhausting to simply believe the lies even when we know them to be false. So we choose to believe there is no inflation even though the evidence of our pocketbooks disagree. We choose to believe that as the Iraq War continues longer and longer that the dead are resurrecting. It is comforting to believe the lies when the truth is so horrible.