Revisionomics

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

Last week, longtime business reporter Felicia Taylor at CNN interviewed several people with possibly better abilities to see the future than the analysts and economists on whom the establishment press normally relies: psychics.

Seriously.

While misguided, I can understand why Ms. Taylor felt the need to seek alternative economic forecasting. It must be really frustrating to place trust in a bunch of alleged smarties who routinely churn out predictions that are consistently and predictably — but somehow “unexpectedly” — wrong.

There’s little doubt that journalists are getting a bit touchy about using “the U-word,” especially since, far more often than not during the past several years, it has meant “unexpectedly bad.” On Tuesday, in the wake of yet another downward slide in consumer confidence after “experts” had predicted improvement, both Bloomberg and the Associated Press let the U-word slip into their initial reports but purged it in later revisions.

Speaking of revisions, most Americans are probably unaware of what has happened to initial government data since Democrats took control of Congress in 2007. In revisions over the following months and years, already “unexpectedly” bad results have almost invariably gotten worse — often much worse. This situation began to go code red (or really “code blue”) once the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) Economy and the recession as normal people define it kicked in three years ago.