Robert Burke is the Libertarian Party’s candidate for governor of Wisconsin. The following is a press release from the Burke campaign:
Friday the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest jobs numbers indicating the unemployment rate dropped to 5.9%, the best since 2012, and that there were 248K new jobs created. In the details of the release we find the data points to a fraud that goes back almost 20 years. Not only were the majority of the jobs in low paying “retail trade, leisure and hospitality, education and health and temp help,” according financial blog Zerohedge, but they also point to data that shows 93% of the jobs went to people 55-69. This is not a brand new one time manifestation but the ongoing unintended consequences created in 1995 by The Boskin Commission who fraudulently manipulated the calculation of the US Consumer Price Index.
“The charts clearly show the manipulation’s effect on seniors retirement beginning in 1996,” says Libertarian candidate for Governor Robert Burke. “The net effect is that Social Security and other programs that are linked to the CPI have systematically failed to keep up with inflation forcing seniors to remain in the workforce eating up the jobs our youth would use as an entry point into the job market.”
According to Burke’s research the Boskin Commission, formally known as the “Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index,” adjusted three key measures of the CPI calculation. The result has been to understated inflation and according to Economist John Williams of Shadowstats.com, as of 2008 the government had underfunded increases in programs by as much as 72 percent, a number far worse today due to the money printing that dug the US out of the financial crisis in 2008.
Worst, says Burke, the level of fraud has become so endemic that the current official inflation is 2.1% while we are currently paying more for milk than at any time in history. “This isn’t just affecting seniors. Our famers profits have plunged over 25% this year all due to inflation and it is not a mysterious force but a very predictable outcome of the Federal Reserve money printing.”
The three changes Burke refers to are called Substitution, Geometric Weighting, and Hedonics. Each is designed to subjectively manipulation of the calculation. “The grossest dishonesty is Substitution,” Burke adds. “The idea is that when steak goes up 10%, and hamburger 2%, the consumer will eat hamburger instead. So what this measures is not inflation but survival, which explains why some seniors have decided to substitute hamburger with cat food.”
“I don’t know how much direct experience with social services(sic) [you have]”
Plenty, and far more than enough.
“I can tell you that those who are recieving food stamps are living on $184 or less a month. Section 8 vouchers (in Seattle at least) only provide for an $874 monthly rent. ”
If you think that everyone receiving those “benefits” has no other income you are not living in reality. The vast majority have under the table jobs, other forms of welfare they receive (some of which I mentioned), illegal income, money from friends and family, money saved up and so on. Furthermore you don’t mention multiple members of the same households sharing the rent vouchers and all having their own food stamps (or EBTs or SNAPs or whatever they are called now).
“As someone who has lived on the tiny stipence in food stamps, and the state paying my premium on Medicare, I can assure you with no question, that no one is living well on social services.”
Even if that was true, it is still not true that these so-called services don’t exist or that millions of people are not using them. But, what you said is not even true. I know plenty of people who don’t need government “benefits” but take them anyway. I also know plenty of people who claim disability but are not actually disabled and could work if they wanted to, or in fact do work off the books. And plenty of others who could definitely work but have no ambition to do so since they have found ways to survive off government “services” even if it is at a minimum level.
“As far as 1996, I realize you are being ironic. The Democrats and Republicans passed the abolition of welfare and Clinton signed it.”
Then why are so many people still on it and so much tax money, more than in 1996 by far, going to them? Please explain how that could be.
“And at the same time there was no effort to increase minimum wage so that all the people tossed off social services were only able to get minimum wage jobs. ”
Even fewer of them would have been able to get jobs if the minimum wage was raised, or prices would have gone up by at least enough to offset any increase. And in fact the minimum wage IS being raised, and that is exactly what is happening.
“If it were true that demand drives wages in 1996 we would have seen a massive increaes in the hourly wage of the lower end of the work force.”
Why? I don’t see why that would be.
I don’t know how much direct experience with social services, but as one who has spent many hours dealing with the bureaucracy, I can tell you that those who are recieving food stamps are living on $184 or less a month. Section 8 vouchers (in Seattle at least) only provide for an $874 monthly rent. In Seattle, in 2014. HUD is selling off the old public housing complexes to private developers, and housing vouchers are being restructured so that starting in six years the amount of rent people are required to pay more and more of the actual rent themselves. As someone who has lived on the tiny stipence in food stamps, and the state paying my premium on Medicare, I can assure you with no question, that no one is living well on social services.
As far as 1996, I realize you are being ironic. The Democrats and Republicans passed the abolition of welfare and Clinton signed it. And at the same time there was no effort to increase minimum wage so that all the people tossed off social services were only able to get minimum wage jobs.
If it were true that demand drives wages in 1996 we would have seen a massive increaes in the hourly wage of the lower end of the work force.
Coulda fooled me, because I keep running into people whose whole lifestyle is covered by welfare, from housing to medicine to food to education, transportation and even cell phones etc. In some cases their families have lived this lifestyle for generations now, and many of them have no interest in doing anything else, wouldn’t begin to conceive of how to go about it if they did, or both. This is reality that I see all around me on a day to day basis before and after 1996. It seems to bear very little resemblance to your comment.
The chart above shows that food stamp use went from 27 million in 2008 to 46-48 since 2012. I’d be willing to bet that non-payment for emergency room services (I deeply resemble that remark myself), government “education” spending in real terms (inflation adjusted if you wish), medicare/medicaid/state equivalent spending, etc., are all substantially higher now than in 1996. There’s still plenty of government housing projects and section 8 housing vouchers all over the place and still plenty of people on SSI/disability, many of whom are not actually disabled. Feel free to include inflation and population growth in any statistics you bring up, I bet it still has gone up, and accounts for tens of millions of people using these so-called “services”, and did both before and after 1996, so how can you describe that as “abolition of much of what little social welfare there was in the US in 1996?”
I did a quick search. It appears to have levelled off in the last couple of years, after a huge spurt in the previous few, but not declined in any meaningful way and may be going up again according to the source I found:
I wonder if as unemployment *appears* to be declining EBT/Food Stamps use has increased or declined? I’ll have to send an email to Richard Wolff and see what he can find out.
I’ve always wondered if the 1996 “adjustment” to the CPI was tied in to the abolition of much of what little social welfare there was in the US in 1996? By messing ith the CPI the government can keep low social benefits like food stamps (they’re not tied directly to the CPI, but upward pressure on the CPI has in the past lead to an increase in federal funding of food stamps, and this change to the CPI also allows businesses to hold down wages because there is no apparent inflation to foce/incentivize wage increases.
The job force participation percentage is lowest in decades. The lower unemployment numbers are mostly due to people giving up looking or work or being unemployed so long they no longer get unemployment insurance and no longer count as part of the workforce. If unemployment percentages now were calculated the same way they were in the 1930s depression, there is as high or higher unemployment now as there was then.