There were rumours going back to the Bush Presidency that data coming out of the Federal Government was falsified. It was always one political side pushing back against the other.
I knew a Labor economist who said, “There are good people at the BLS and they would never fake data.”
Ideally, you’d like to trust your government which your hard-earned money goes to support. We are discovering that our hard-earned money was simply a grift for the politically connected. It’s going to get worse.
I read Craig Pirrong’s excellent piece this morning and you should too. It makes my blood boil. John Stossel wrote in the NY Post that he is with Musk. You should be with him too.
From Craig’s blog:
Among the shrieks are “NOBODY ELECTED ELON MUSK!” and “THIS IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL.”
Well, nobody elected any of these bureaucrats. Musk and his DOGE minions are the designated agents of the man who was elected as chief executive.
Which gets to the nub of the issue of constitutionality. The real constitutional issue is how is it remotely possible that employees of the executive branch are independent of the chief executive, who by the Constitution exclusively wields executive authority. The whole idea of a bureaucracy independent of the chief executive is at best a constitutional deformity, and really a constitutional monstrosity.
One issue is the president’s authority to direct spending, or more precisely, to stop spending on, say, queer studies in the 3rd World. Here the Government Party is hoist on its own petard. Trump is going after expenditures not explicitly authorized by Congress. In essence, shirking its responsibility, Congress has shoveled money at agencies like USAID and said “knock yourselves out! Go to town! Have a spree!”, which the agencies obliged like a drunken sailor who found a wad of $100s lying on the sidewalk.
Yes, Congress appropriated money for the agencies. And yes, there will be a court challenge to Trump’s actions. But he has a strong case: you gave money to these agencies with no strings attached, that is, with discretion on how it is to be spent. Fine. I will exercise my discretion by not spending it. And certainly not on funding NGOs (whom nobody elected, BTW).
This is a fight he wants. It is a fight we should want. And it is a fight he can win, both in the courts and politically. (my bold)
One of the most critical data points the market trades on is the Unemployment numbers. It turns out, the US numbers are no better than China’s. They are made up. Fictional. They are released to set a narrative.
Here is another way to look at the job numbers.
1,045,000 foreign-born workers found jobs under Biden-Kamala in January, while only 8,000 native born Americans did. How many Democrat voters have been trying to find jobs and haven't? You can thank those you voted for. And, all those screaming about Elon & DOGE auditing the government with Top Security Clearances: 700,000 of those foreigners are working for the government, WITHOUT Top Security Clearances, with full access to all your personal information!
As my friend Craig said, it is abundantly clear that US jobs data was faked. How much data is released by the government bureaucracy and is also faked? Can we trust medical data? We know Covid data was totally messed up. Can we trust crop report data? Energy data?
And heads need to roll. There’s nothing preventing all this from happening again in the absence of real accountability. How’s it USAID head Samantha Power is worth over $30m on a government salary of $180k? It’s not enough to just uncover the fraud and end it. Examples need to be made.
I was an auditor at Purdue Research Foundation, quite a while ago. The overhead/burden rate was a pretty ridiculous subject. To their credit PRF actually looked into what was overhead being used for.
The shocker for me was that Purdue got a significantly less amount of overhead from NSF (we were specifically auditing NSF grants) than MIT or Stanford. I keep seeing 65% as the rate but seem to recall the Boilers getting something like 35% and MIT getting 45% or 50%.
We followed up with NSF who dutifully told us, 'it takes more to run an institution like MIT or Stanford, so we pay them higher overheads'. So MIT and Stanford paid higher salaries, had more expensive lab equipment and went to more conferences/junkets than Purdue, because they declared they like to spend more money than Purdue.
I like the across the board maximum of 15%. The Universities can allocate the overhead any way they like, but can compete on actual pricing rather than a rigged system like it was.