Archive for the ‘COLA’ Category
Now Seniors Get To Feel The Bezzle
Now Seniors Get To Feel The Bezzle
Posted by Karl Denninger
If you remember just a short while ago I reported on what certainly appears to be a very clumsy scam pulled by the BLS in their so-called “inflation” reading published on the 19th of February – where the numbers they presented simply didn’t add up, and as a consequence put forward a false CPI, or inflation number.
Curiously, we haven’t heard anything from the BLS on this “error”.
This, of course, is only an “error” in that it is not the actual means by which the BLS is “supposed” to report “inflation.”
But the BLS has twice in the last 30 years revised their methodology, both times with the intent of understating “inflation.”
Why? Well, a big part of the reason is that the law says that various benefit programs are supposed to be indexed to inflation. By intentionally understating inflation Senior Citizens and others on various fixed-income entitlement programs funded by government get intentionally screwed.
The Senate yesterday rejected a $250 one-time check to Seniors and others who have been so-screwed for the last two decades:
President Barack Obama has called for Congress to approve the payments to make up for their benefits not increasing this year, but the Senate defeated it 50 to 47.
….
Social Security payments for the elderly and disabled will stay flat this year for the first time since 1975 because they are tied to consumer prices, which decreased amid the worst economic recession in 70 years.
Of course the real problem doesn’t lie here. As is usually the case the media won’t talk about the fact that the current inflation rate, if measured under the “old” methodology, never went anywhere near zero.
How much does this “count”? Tremendously so. Over a ten year time frame understating inflation by 7% results in your Social Security payments being half of what they would otherwise be. If the understatement is by just 3% you get a 35% underpayment at the end of a ten year period.
Of course what the media reports is the “one time” payment was rejected, but what they don’t report is that seniors have been screwed for three decades by intentional book-cooking in the government.
And by the way – no, there is no possibility of the government “fixing this” and paying what the law says they should. The money doesn’t exist.
But this scam, along with dozens of others, is how our fabulous government managed to run its Ponzi Scheme for as long as it has – a Ponzi that is now collapsing, irrespective of what you’re being told by the vacuous bobbing heads on national television.
If you’re a senior and been paying “membership dues” to AARP, you might want to ask them why their much-vaunted “lobbying” and “public education” campaigns haven’t focused on this for the previous 20 years – and why they sold you down the river.
Hope you like your kids (and they like you) Seniors, because the government tit is rapidly running dry.
CPI Number Reported INTENTIONALLY INCORRECT?
CPI Number Reported INTENTIONALLY INCORRECT?
Posted by Karl Denninger
Remember the market’s “cheering” of the “-0.1%” CPI-U reading (core) yesterday?
There’s a problem – it was wrong.
Look at the highlighted numbers. Let’s multiply them up.
(5.966 x 0) + (.769 x -2.1) + (25.206 x -0.1) + (.347 x 0.4) / 32.288 = -0.12%, or -0.1%.
But it was reported as -0.5% in the line directly above (inverted tone.)
Oops.
I didn’t re-run the weightings for the entire series but a quick “eyeball” of the table shows that this should result in a CORE reading of 0.1% (positive), not the negative number reported.
Will the BLS admit to this error? Who the hell knows, but if you have a calculator, you can verify that yet another game to “boost” the market was run, with desire effect – a roughly 1/2% spike in the S&P 500 futures right on the BOGUS data release.
Since this table is undoubtedly computed (indeed, if I was to dump the raw data into EXCEL I could have a spreadsheet do this literally in a fraction of a second) it calls into question whether this was an accident or an intentional distortion of the data at the BLS.
It also leads to a few other questions, none of which are very comfortable to consider, but all of which, unfortunately and in light of this report, we must.
For example, is the BLS simply publishing whatever the government wants it to, and then making up the numbers inside the report to hit that target? Even a simple high-school cheat knows that you must “fix” the constituent numbers that go into a cheated result in order to not get (easily) caught; in a world where people don’t add things with calculators but instead have computers sum up columns and do the math it is essentially impossible that this sort of ”mistake” is an error.
Rather, it is virtually certain that this “reported” value was in fact intentionally false, and the persons doing so were too clumsy to “fix” the evidence behind it so that it would “add up.”
We now officially live in a world where intentionally-incorrect data is published by our government for the specific intention of misleading the markets.
PS: This will, of course, be used to screw Social Security recipients out of their lawfully-mandated cost-of-living increases. Count on that. Oh, and don’t ask about the money you already got screwed out of from other similar “errors” that neither I or anyone else caught because they weren’t so clumsy as to fail to cover it up.







