A recurring theme here is that the most important data put out by the federal government are all fundamentally fraudulent in ways intended to deceive the public into supporting ongoing increase in the size and power of the government.   Examples from past posts include accounting for the size of GDP by including all government purchases at 100 cents on the dollar; measurement of the so-called "poverty" rate excluding close to $1 trillion annually in in-kind distributions; and reporting of the government debt and deficit on a cash rather than accrual basis to conceal the blow up and impending collapse of the social security/Medicare/Medicaid ponzi scheme.

Well, recent news has three more good examples of fundamental government fraud practiced on the people.  And these three examples are not little ones either -- they are all massive, systematic efforts to support huge programs of government growth.  I'll lay them out briefly here and develop them further in future posts.

First up, we have the data reported by the Census Bureau on income of retirees.  That data is then taken up by the Social Security Administration for purposes of its "Income of the Aged" data, which are then widely cited as showing that many over age 65 have low income, or are even in "poverty" by official definitions.  Here is an SSA chart on number of the aged in various categories deemed to be in "poverty" by this methodology.   Headline quote in bold:

High proportions of nonmarried and minority persons aged 65 or older are poor or near poor.

Sylvester Schieber and Andrew Biggs expose the fraud in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on January 23 titled "Retirees Aren't Headed for the Poor House."   Turns out that the Census Bureau (as usual)  just systematical fails to count most of the important information in order to drive up the "poverty" numbers.

The CPS measures the sources and amounts of income received by American households, including income from retirement plans. The Census Bureau's definition of income, however, includes only payments made on a regular, periodic basis. So monthly benefits paid from a defined benefit pension or an annuity are counted as income, while as-needed withdrawals from 401(k)s or IRAs are not.

Result:  The data "that ostensibly documents how poorly pensions and individual retirement plans provide retirement income ignores at least 60% of the income being delivered to retirees."  Of course, based on the fraudulent data, we have Senators like Tom Harkin and Elizabeth Warren currently demanding large increases in benefit payments from the soon-to-be-bankrupt social security system.

Next up, we have the black hole of Obamacare.  There we are gradually finding out about a fundamental structure intentionally designed to conceal impending collapse from the voters until after the 2016 presidential election.  Betsy McCaughey has the story in the New York Post of January 27:

Section 1342 of the Affordable Care Act forces taxpayers to make insurers whole for most of the losses they incur selling policies on the ObamaCare exchanges through 2016. The bailout is meant to hide the full failure of the president’s signature health law until after the next presidential election.

McCaughey goes on to describe unsuccessful efforts to get HHS to give any kind of numbers on what this bailout is expected to cost the taxpayers.  Oh, and by the way, Moody's just "downgraded its outlook for the entire health insurance industry from stable to negative, blaming ObamaCare."  That sounds like risky territory for Moody's to be treading in, given the recent $5 billion government lawsuit against S&P that S&P (very justifiably in my view) attributes to revenge for S&P's downgrade of U.S. sovereign debt.

And I've saved the most important one for last.  If there's one thing we all think we know, it's that the earth "is warming."  Why do we know it?  Because of government temperature records, all kept by global warming activist zealots in places like NASA and NOAA.  But a small number of dogged, volunteer researchers combing through data archives have been reporting that the older data has been systematically altered, particularly to make earlier years cooler and, to some degree, later years warmer.  In the process the government has removed from its records the earlier versions of the data; but the researchers have located archived versions of the earlier data in other locations.  This fraud, of course, supports the attempted and ongoing multi-trillion dollar takeover by the government of the energy business and the suppression of the fossil fuel business.

Most on top of this systematic data tampering has been a guy who blogs under the name Steven Goddard at Real Science.  (I understand the name to be a pseudonym.)  In a post here from December 21, 2013 Goddard compares the trend of reported U.S. temperatures from GISS (a part of NASA) as recorded in versions of the records from 1999, 2001, 2012, and 2013.   Over 14 years, a clear negative trend of 1930 to present turns into a positive trend.  In another post from January 8, 2014, Goddard graphs NASA/NOAA alterations to the data that manufacture cooling of earlier-year (particularly pre-1960)  temperatures and thereby make the present appear warmer. 

Several skeptics of the government data have been attempting to get explanations from the government by means of FOIA requests.  They have been met with nothing but stonewalling to date.  This is a gigantic story that you probably have heard little about, but it is not going to go away.