This government provides the population with all sorts of statistics on all sorts of things, such as the poverty rate, the graduation rate, the unemployment rate, the growth of the economy, the labor hourly working rate, the inflation rate, and so on and so forth. The thing about those statistics is even if a given governmental agency was truly trying to provide the most accurate information and thereby disseminate that to the general public, the fact that the United States is so large and that it takes time and resources to gather all of the pertinent information so needed to provide a precise picture, is that we have to take into full account that the government also has an abiding desire to paint a picture that is more positive than negative, and further to the point, the government has the inclination to manipulate numbers to make that government look like its more effective in its programs and agencies than it actually is.
The truth of the matter is that governments the world over, lie to the people, for various reasons, but the most important reason that governments lie is to keep those in power, at their positions of power, and to a lesser extent not to worry the people, about things that they might rightly worry about. This is why the government does not present the whole picture, because it doesn’t want to look bad when it comes to the actual inflation figures, employment numbers, or real wages, and just about anything in which the general public wonders what is going on with their tax dollars, and why it is that nothing seems to change for the better when the government insists that times have never been better.
Indeed, governments don’t desire to tell the inconvenient truth, which thereby makes it more difficult for the general population to hold them accountable to the truth, because the public doesn’t know the long and the short of it. So then, the public may rightly believe that what they are being told, is not the full truth. Perhaps this is a good thing, because fear leads to restlessness, and restlessness leads to civil unrest, but what governments seem to not take into account, is those that who suspect and then eventually know that they have been deceived, are going to take offense at that, and that therefore this will invariably cause some sort of payback. After all, our eyes seldom deceive us, and those then that propagate and thereby distort the reality of what is going on, aren’t actually doing anyone any favors, because that which needs to be attended to, remains unattended because it has already been propagated that all is fine.
This is supposed to be a government of, for, and by the people, and the very least that the people deserve to know is the good and bad of where they stand within that government, and further to the point, it’s difficult to correct what needs to be corrected, when what needs to be accomplished, isn’t known for a fact, because the supposed facts are purposely distorted and wrong.