Don't tell me you really want the Clinton economy back again!

President Clinton gave a list of why his wife is the best person to be president, but focused much of his speech on economic issues.

He also touted the performance of the U.S. economy during his tenure as president versus the current administration and said his wife has the best economic plan to return the nation to prosperity.

President Clinton said during his administration the economy created 22.7 million new jobs, while the current one only created 5 million. He also said during his administration the average family saw its income increase by $7,500, but in the current administration, adjusted for inflation, the average family saw its income decrease by $1,000.

In one or another sound bite this morning, Hillary Clinton spoke about the economic boom during the Clinton administration and more than hinted that her administration would guarantee more of the same.  God forbid.  Neither Clinton appears to have checked out what Kevin Phillips, political commentator and economic data sleuth reports in a new book, excerpted in Harper's.  Bill Clinton turns out to have been an economic charlatan and he is not alone.

...Since the 1960's, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics:  the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured.  The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed.  If Washington's harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the US economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.

In other words, we've been living a lie, a lie which, if not invented by the Clinton administration, was allowed to become so powerful that Hillary Clinton believes she can run on her husband's record even as Pennsylvanians living in some of the most economically difficult areas cheer her on.

How did Bill Clinton -- how do so many in successive administrations since the Kennedy era -- get away with it?  The answer is right out of Orwell or, more familiarly, out of Rove's playbook.  If you don't like the numbers, change the way they are framed and reported.   Phillips writes:

The corruption has tainted the very measure that most shape public perception of the economy -- the monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI), which serves as the chief bellwether of inflation; the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which tracks the US economy's overall growth; and the monthly unemployment figure, which for the general public is perhaps the most vivid indicator of economic health or infirmity.

Let's just take the inflation figures.  Whenever we are given the latest numbers, certain key products are kept out of the mix.   Food and fuel, for example.  We do know that oil has tripled in price over the past eight years.  We know that oil prices contribute to inflated food prices.  But neither fuel nor food are included in "core inflation" figure.   We know, if we think about it, that the rate of inflation is much greater than the relatively low figures reported.  In case we haven't noticed, Phillips spells it out.

Readers should ask themselves how much angrier the electorate might be if the media, over the past five years, had been citing 8 percent unemployment (instead of 5 percent), 5 percent inflation (instead of 2 percent), and average annual growth in the 1 percent range (instead of the 3-4 percent range). 

This isn't a conspiracy hatched by the Bush administration or the Clinton administration.  It's been going on for years.  Presumably those who have been tracking it are the same people who are now saying, "We saw this coming." 

But it wasn't a conspiracy, just a political convenience.  Do you want to be the member of Congress or the president who says, candidly, that the economy is in not very good shape?  As Phillips puts it, "There was no grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms."  He goes on to trace the opportunist-presidents who designed and employed the lies.

Kennedy hid high jobless numbers because they "marred the image of Camelot-on-the-Potomac."  Johnson "tweaked the Gross National Product numbers before their release."  Nixon "developed his own taste for statistical improvement" and put together a system in which only the happier numbers were reported.  Reagan used skewed figures and "simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of numbers"  Bush 1 and Clinton redefined the Consumer Price Index with help from Alan Greenspan. 

Kevin Phillips has thrashed Bush 2 to a pulp in most other respects, but he does conclude that Bush 2 didn't fool with the numbers to the extent Clinton did:  "Despite the present Bush administration's overall penchant for manipulating data (e.g., Iraq, climate change), it has yet to match its predecessor in economic revisions."

Bottom line?

After forty years of manipulation, more than a few measurements of the US economy have been distorted beyond recognition.

So along with the unraveling of the financial markets we are having to deal with government duplicity and serious questions about the health of the economy.  The lies are surfacing.  The real numbers are there.

The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water.  Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today's US unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is as high as 7 or even 10 percent...

Get that?  The real inflation rate is near 10%!

...Economic growth since the recession of 2oo1 has been mediocre, despite a huge surge in the wealth and incomes of the superrich, and we are falling back into recession.  ...Undermeasurement of inflation, in particular, hangs over our heads like a guillotine.  To  acknowledge it would sent interest rates climbing and thereby would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt...

We don't have Nixon or Kennedy or the rest to kick around anymore, but shouldn't we be asking the candidates about their take on this?  Before Pennsylvanians vote in their primary, shouldn't they know what it means when Senator Clinton says she wants to lay more Clinton economics on all of us?  Should we stand there and applaud when Bill Clinton "touted," as he did yesterday, that "the performance of the U.S. economy during his tenure as president versus the current administration and said his wife has the best economic plan to return the nation to prosperity"?  Or should we confront the Clinton campaign with hard questions?

Naw. That would be mean.