Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“‘There are three kinds of lies,’ Mark Twain wrote in 1907, echoing several prior formulations and (apparently incorrectly) crediting Benjamin Disraeli as the quote’s originator: ‘Lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ I’m far from the first commentator to modify that final bit to ‘government statistics.’ The job of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is to make the current administration look good, even if that requires putting lipstick on a pig. … Government manipulation of data starts with deciding what information to gather, how to gather it, and who to gather it from. Then that information gets massaged to tell the story that the masseuse or masseur wants you to hear.” (08/12/25)