The Pravda Press "Fact Checks" President Trump On D.C. Crime Statistics

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New Record Set For Deaths From Climate And Weather Disasters

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New Record Set For Deaths From Climate And Weather Disasters

  • During the first half of 2025, a new record was set for the number of deaths caused by climate and weather disasters. Can you guess what that record was?

  • If you read left-wing media sources, and believe anything they say, you might think that the recent record has something to do with a large and growing number of deaths. Recent articles in sources like CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and CBS News all explicitly claim that climate change is making weather events “deadlier,” or leading to increasing numbers of deaths, or some variation of that same message. I’m sure if you checked thirty such “mainstream” news sources over the past year, all thirty of them would have pieces parroting that same narrative.

  • Therefore you might be surprised by the actual record that has been set: The first half of 2025 (January to June) has seen the fewest number of deaths from climate and weather disasters of any first half year this century.

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More On Counting Federal Spending As A Full-Value Addition To GDP

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  • My last post on Tuesday has inspired a spirited debate in the comments about how federal spending should properly be accounted for in GDP. What is the right answer? After reading the comments, it occurs to me that there are several more points to make.

  • For those criticizing or disagreeing with my post — led by prolific commenter Richard Greene — the main theme has been that many large categories of federal spending make an obvious positive contribution to the economy. Examples given include the Defense Department, teachers/education, and national parks.

  • Surely excluding those kinds of things entirely from GDP accounting would provide at least as deceptive an indicator of the true size of the economy as including them at full cost value. And if those kinds of things, and many others, are not included at full cost value, what is the alternative? Some flat percentage discount could be applied, but there is no obvious constant level of discount that would be appropriate for all categories of spending; and reasonable people could disagree on varying levels of discount for different categories. Maybe defense should even be included at a premium!

  • My answer to this critique was at least suggested in the prior post. . . .

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Is Some Honesty About To Come To Government Economic Statistics?

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  • A recurring theme at this blog over the years has been the rank dishonesty of many of our government’s economic statistics.

  • Rather than being neutral indicators of the state of the country and its economy, the most important government statistics have been crafted and manipulated to maximize their usefulness to advocates for increases in the size of government and in government spending. Here is a particularly detailed post on this subject from back in December 2016.

  • The two main areas of focus here have been the statistics on GDP and on poverty. Both of those come from the Commerce Department.

  • In the case of GDP, the biggest issue is that government spending on goods and services is counted as a 100-cents-on-the-dollar addition to GDP. That means that the most wasteful spending gives an apparent but false boost to the economy; and even more importantly, that any cut to government spending, no matter how wasteful the spending may have been, gets portrayed as a hit to the economy and a harbinger of recession.

  • For today, I’ll consider the GDP statistics.

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Continuing Manipulation Of Poverty Statistics

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Continuing Manipulation Of Poverty Statistics

  • As I have written many times, I don’t think that the federal measure of “poverty” in the United States was originally created with fraudulent intent to deceive the voters.

  • However, as the measure of poverty has evolved over the years, the thing deemed “poverty” by the statistics no longer bears any meaningful resemblance to what normal people think of as poverty. Rather than measuring anything that might resemble actual physical deprivation, the statistics have evolved into an artifact to manipulate the voters. In a post about a year ago I described what I call the “poverty scam” as follows:

  • [T]he government cynically manipulates the poverty statistics so that the official measured rate of poverty never goes meaningfully down, no matter how much taxpayer money is spent, thus manufacturing a fake basis to hit up the people for ever increasing funding at regular intervals.

  • Over the past week or so we have just been treated to the umpteenth iteration of this poverty scam.

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You Must Assume That All Information Put Out By Our Government Is Corrupt

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You Must Assume That All Information Put Out By Our Government Is Corrupt

  • Throughout the agencies of our federal government, an important function is to issue data and information about the state of the country.

  • These data cover a vast array of topics such as population, demographics, income and poverty, the state of the economy, the GDP, employment and unemployment, activities of foreign adversaries, weather and climate, energy production and use, and much, much more. The Congress and states use this information in making important public policy decisions, and the people use it to make decisions for their everyday lives. Not the least of those decisions is how to vote.

  • So is the information issued by the government basically honest and reliable for important decisions? Or, instead, is the output of official information cynically manipulated and corrupted by a government interested mainly in perpetuating and increasing its own power?

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