Kevin Phillips has a great piece in the current Harpers about how the economy is much shakier than is painted by official stats. Essentially, they've been tweaking the meaning of the Consumer Price Index, unemployment, etc. for decades, and if we used the older standards our rates wold be far more worrisome. Our unemployment rates would be close to those in Europe, etc.
Here's a telling line:
'"All in all," Williams points out, "if you were to peel back changes that were made in the CPI going back to the Carter years, you'd see that the CPI would now be 3.5 percent to 4 percent higher"—meaning that, because of lost CPI increases, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are.'
I really like Kevin Phillips' writing, though I'll be damned if I understand where he's coming from. He is one of the greater Republican strategists of the past half century, but more recently he has dedicated his career to attacking Bush, financial elites (actually doing it with real critique, not some Fox News trick) and the growing economic inequality in America. Interesting stuff.
You should come by the store and pick up the current Harpers, or, if you're cheap and prefer to slowly blind yourself reading truncated magazine articles online (the full piece in Harpers is pay only), check out this version I found online: Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know