Managing Information

Bernanke says there is no inflation. No consequence to his promiscuous production and distribution of US currency that is now driving commodity, oil, gasoline and grocery product prices through the roof. Oh wait, he modified that position recently to suggest that maybe there was a little price pressure.

When a government official, in this case a top, self glorified, non-elected official makes such blatant distorted statements, we ask, “What is going on?” We answer our own question, “One of two things.” Either he is deluded to the point of illness and does not have any sense of cause and effect much less the experience of pushing a cart up and down grocery store aisles and filling his own gas tank, or he is just plain deluded into thinking that his lying is of no consequence because his audience is either stupid, clueless or can’t do anything about the lies anyway so why be concerned. Transparency? Not an iota. Managing information. Sure. But in such a ham-handed manner that his foreign counterparts dismiss his monetary policy as just an extension of promiscuous fiscal political nonsense. Not only is he not doing his job, he is engaging in activities that produce results counter to the very objectives codified in the laws that empower him.

Does everyone lie? Everyone manage information? Does everyone spin for their own purpose(s)?

That question is pretty broad. Let’s back off for a minute. We’ll come back to it.

America’s appetite for goods and services does not appear to be abating. GDP, a fair measure of America’s consumption of goods and services, is presented below in purchasing power adjusted dollars (billions) and it keeps going up. Goes up by a lot over the last 60 years.

Year         GDP

1950      $ 293.7

1970       1038.3

1990       5800.5

2010     14660.4

Source: http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm#gdp

Pretty strong growth, huh? Lots of jobs, huh? As a matter of fact, we should have a job shortage based on the economic strength of the GDP numbers. So, why don’t we? Why are we tolerating politicians who cannot answer that simple question? Who actually pass laws and impose burdens that make the situation worse? Well it may just come down to managing information. We have now reached the point in our brief history where someone telling the truth appears to be mentally unstable. And they are dismissed as radical or goofy. They are ridiculed. We choose to embrace deceptions rather than face facts. We don’t want to hear facts.

Most politicians, when running for office, actually engage in a brief period of telling the truth? When is that? How can you tell when they are telling the truth? It’s simple. It’s when they are describing, critiquing or otherwise commenting upon their opponent’s record. That is now the only time in American political theatre when a politician tells the truth.

Obama ran on transparency. He governs opaquely. He chooses to not tell the truth or he obfuscates by telling us that he is doing something non transparent for our own good. Pretty rich, huh? Do they lie to us to protect us? Can we not handle the truth?

Right now, briefly, candidates like Donald Trump are speaking the truth. They are being ridiculed.

Could we actually elect a campaigning truth teller and survive if that person continued to tell the truth?

Apparently not. We, the people, go out of our way to avoid that situation. We most certainly do not hold our elected and appointed officials accountable to the same level of truth telling that they require of us. Very strange how the government can lie to us (legal) but we cannot lie to it (illegal.) Very strange indeed.

Colonel Nathan R. Jessep was right. We can’t handle the truth. We prefer to be lied to.