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CH — LARRY ROMANOFF — 美国经济统计的欺诈矩阵

Luisa Vasconcellos

October 31, 2022

211

The Fraudulent Matrix of US Economic Statistics

美国经济统计的欺诈矩阵

By Larry Romanoff, September 27^th, 2022

作者：Larry Romanoff，2022年9月27日

翻译者。珍珠

CHINESE ENGLISH

The US government and Western media enjoy accusing other nations of producing unreliable economic numbers, but it is widely recognised that there are no national economic statistics in the world as deliberately unreliable and misleading as those of the US. One notable feature of the Great Transformation was the US government’s innovativeness in fabricating statistics that raised economic misinformation to an art form. Many researchers have published studies demonstrating that the official US economic statistics in nearly all areas are badly distorted to paint a positive picture widely divergent from reality, but with the compliant media controlling the narrative, few Americans have any idea of the true state of their economy or the personal consequences of these statistical manipulations. As one commenter noted, “The jobs numbers are fraudulent, the unemployment rate is deceptive, the inflation measures are understated, and the GDP growth rate is overstated. Americans live in a matrix of lies.”

美国政府和西方媒体喜欢指责其他国家提供不可靠的经济数据，但人们普遍认为，世界上没有任何国家的经济统计数据像美国那样故意不可靠和误导。大变革的一个显著特征是美国政府在编造统计数据方面的创新，将经济错误信息提升为一种艺术形式。许多研究人员发表的研究表明，几乎所有领域的美国官方经济统计数据都严重扭曲，描绘出一幅与现实大相径庭的积极画面，但由于顺从的媒体控制着报道，很少有美国人知道他们经济的真实状况或这些统计操作的个人后果。正如一位评论员指出的那样，“就业数字是虚假的，失业率是欺骗性的，通货膨胀指标被低估，GDP增长率被高估。美国人生活在谎言的矩阵中。

As we will see, the true unemployment rate is far higher than the number officially stated, inflation is more than three times as high as the US government acknowledges, and the GDP only little more than half of the published numbers. The same is true with statistics on wages, housing, and more.

正如我们将看到的那样，实际失业率远高于官方公布的数字，通货膨胀率是美国政府承认的三倍多，GDP仅略高于公布数字的一半。工资、住房等统计数据也是如此。

GDP

国内生产总值

You don’t have to be an economist to appreciate the difficulties in comparing national GDP rates nor the opportunities for deceit in their compilation. As an example, if our two countries and economies are identical but yours has a higher divorce rate, the legal fees and other costs of the divorce process will be added to your nation’s economic output and your country will have a higher GDP. That doesn’t mean your people are richer, nor does it mean your country is a better place to live. Similarly, if your country is as rabidly litigious as is the US, all those billions in legal fees from lawsuits will be added to your GDP. But again, that doesn’t mean your people are richer. In fact, except for the lawyers, they are all poorer, and it almost certainly isn’t a better place to live.

你不必成为一名经济学家，就可以理解比较国家GDP率的困难，也不必理解在汇编过程中存在的欺骗机会。例如，如果我们两个国家和经济体是相同的，但你们的离婚率较高，离婚过程中的法律费用和其他费用将增加到你们国家的经济产出中，你们国家的GDP也会更高。这并不意味着你们的人民更富有，也不意味着你们国家更适合居住。同样，如果你的国家和美国一样热衷于诉讼，那么诉讼产生的数十亿法律费用将计入你的GDP。但是，这并不意味着你的人民更富有。事实上，除了律师，他们都很穷，而且几乎可以肯定这不是一个更好的居住地方。

Education and health care are similar. If my country has a government-sponsored healthcare system and public schools and universities, these will be recorded in my GDP calculations at their low cost. If your country, like the US, has privately-owned and profit-driven health care and educational systems, the much higher costs will be recorded in your GDP statistics as a reflection of a much higher economic output. But that does not mean your people are richer than mine, and in fact they are much poorer because they must spend a high percentage of their incomes for health care and education.

教育和卫生保健是相似的。如果我的国家有政府资助的医疗体系和公立学校和大学，这些将以低成本记录在我的GDP计算中。如果你的国家像美国一样，拥有私有的、以利润为导向的医疗和教育系统，那么更高的成本将被记录在你的GDP统计数据中，以反映更高的经济产出。但这并不意味着你们的人民比我的人民更富有，事实上他们更穷，因为他们必须将收入的很大一部分用于医疗保健和教育。

If your country like the US spends more than $1 trillion on its military each year, these expenditures will be included in your national statistics and this alone would make it almost impossible for us to compete on the basis of GDP. But all that military expense does not make your people rich; instead, it impoverishes them, and all that killing does not make your country a better place than mine, even if you’re doing it to make the world safe for democracy.

如果你的国家像美国一样每年在军事上花费超过1万亿美元，这些支出将包括在你的国家统计数据中，仅此一项就几乎不可能让我们在GDP的基础上竞争。但所有这些军事开支并不能使你们的人民富裕；相反，它使他们变得贫穷，所有这些杀戮并不能使你们的国家比我的国家更美好，即使你们这样做是为了让世界民主安全。

From the above examples, it should be apparent there are many categories of transactions that serve to greatly inflate GDP numbers but that do not indicate wealth in a nation, and may in fact be indications of poverty. It should be apparent that some sectors of a nation’s GDP serve to enrich only a very few individuals while the vast majority of the population are left poorer. Health care is an obvious example, where the owners of insurance and pharma companies, profit-driven hospitals and clinics, are indeed richer for the experience, while virtually all of the population is poorer. The military is another clear example, with only weapons manufacturers and bankers being richer after a war while the impoverished population may be paying the cost for generations.

从上述例子中可以明显看出，有许多类别的交易极大地膨胀了GDP数字，但这些交易并不表示一个国家的财富，事实上可能是贫困的迹象。很明显，一个国家GDP的某些部门只为少数人提供了财富，而绝大多数人口却变得更穷。医疗保健就是一个明显的例子，保险和制药公司的所有者、营利性医院和诊所的所有者确实拥有更丰富的经验，而实际上所有人都更贫穷。军队是另一个明显的例子，只有武器制造商和银行家在战后变得更富有，而贫困人口可能要为几代人付出代价。

Effect of Privatisation on the GDP

私有化对GDP的影响

Also, it should also be obvious that a nation like the US that has privatised most physical and social infrastructure will produce a higher GDP than a country like China where the basic infrastructure is owned by the government. The US prison system is a good example of a service that cost the taxpayers $20 billion before privatisation and $80 billion after. That served to increase the GDP by $60 billion, but only a few people were enriched by the process while millions were impoverished and society not measurably better off.

此外，同样显而易见的是，像美国这样将大部分物质和社会基础设施私有化的国家，其GDP将高于像中国这样基础设施归政府所有的国家。美国监狱系统是一个很好的例子，它在私有化之前花费纳税人200亿美元，在私有化之后花费纳税人800亿美元。这有助于增加600亿美元的国内生产总值，但只有少数人通过这一进程致富，而数百万人处于贫困状态，社会状况也没有明显好转。

The US GDP will be inflated by all the airports, highways, railways, electricity generating stations, schools and universities, and much more, that have all been sold to investors in the private sector with resulting much higher fees and charges to the public, and thus a much higher GDP. But the enlarged GDP is actually an accurate indicator of increasing poverty among the population since the precise amount of that increased GDP must be extracted from the pockets of the population.

美国GDP将因所有机场、公路、铁路、发电站、学校和大学等被出售给私营部门投资者而膨胀，从而导致向公众收取更高的费用和收费，从而导致更高的GDP。但扩大的GDP实际上是人口贫困加剧的准确指标，因为必须从人口口袋中提取增加的GDP的确切数额。

Basic accounting tells us that if someone receives money, someone else must have paid it, because money really doesn’t grow on trees. In the case of privatisation, all people must pay much higher fees and charges to the private firms than they paid before to the government, and it is precisely those increased fees and charges bled from every citizen’s bank account that create the increase in the GDP. The much-increased charges by the private companies will increase the GDP while that same amount is squeezed from the purchasing power of every citizen and concentrated in only a few hands, thus increasing a nation’s income disparity. This is Grade Three arithmetic. It cannot be any other way.

基础会计告诉我们，如果有人收到了钱，一定是别人付的，因为钱真的不会长在树上。在私有化的情况下，所有人都必须向私营企业支付比以前向政府支付高得多的费用，而正是这些增加的费用和收费从每个公民的银行账户中流失，造成了GDP的增长。私营公司大幅增加的费用将增加GDP，而同样的费用将从每个公民的购买力中挤出，集中在少数人手中，从而增加国家的收入差距。这是三级算术。这不可能是任何其他方式。

It should also be obvious that if, for example, China were to sell off its hospitals and its High-Speed rail system to private investors (as the Americans want so badly for China to do), China’s GDP, poverty rate, and income disparity would all rise measurably. When Kunming sold off its best children’s hospital to private owners, the fees charged to patients are already on their way to doubling; those hugely increased costs will increase China’s GDP, but many thousands of families in Kunming will now be poorer.

同样显而易见的是，如果中国向私人投资者出售其医院和高铁系统（正如美国人非常希望中国这样做），中国的GDP、贫困率和收入差距都将大幅上升。当昆明将最好的儿童医院出售给私人业主时，向患者收取的费用已经翻了一番；这些大幅增加的成本将增加中国的GDP，但昆明成千上万的家庭现在将更加贫穷。

Effect of Financialisation on the GDP

金融化对GDP的影响

In another vein, the US economy is so highly financialised that nearly half of the stated GDP consists merely of book entries transferring money from one account to another, not in any way comparable to the real production of manufacturing or the provision of real services. Many international economists have made statements to the effect that “When we remove the financialisation aspects from the accounts, the US real GDP is reduced by nearly 50% and the national per-capita income falls to about $15,000.”

另一方面，美国经济的金融化程度如此之高，以至于近一半的国内生产总值（GDP）仅包括从一个账户向另一个账户转移资金的账面记录，与制造业的实际生产或实际服务的提供没有任何可比性。许多国际经济学家发表声明，大意是“当我们从账户中删除金融化方面时，美国实际GDP减少了近50%，国民人均收入下降到约15000美元。

From the above, you can see that the size of a nation’s GDP can be largely irrelevant to the wealth and prosperity of that nation, and that comparing nations on GDP is fraught with difficulties and arguments. GDP used to be a simple measure of goods and services produced in a nation, and was probably an accurate indicator at some point in the past, but it gradually became a way to record the score in a game of ‘mine is bigger than yours’. So, in addition to the real issues outlined above, we also have the US constantly trying to move the goalposts to increase its score by finding ever more creative ways to boost the GDP numbers.

从上面，你可以看到一个国家的GDP规模与该国的财富和繁荣在很大程度上是无关的，比较各国的GDP充满了困难和争论。GDP过去是衡量一个国家生产的商品和服务的简单指标，在过去可能是一个准确的指标，但它逐渐成为一种在“我的比你的大”游戏中记录分数的方式。因此，除了上述实际问题外，我们还让美国不断尝试移动门柱，通过寻找更具创意的方式来提高GDP数字，从而提高得分。

The Scandal of “Imputed Rents”

征收租金”丑闻

One clever trick by the US government is something called “imputed rent”, which means that if you own a house the government adds to the GDP the amount you would have had to pay in rent (but didn’t), on the mind-twisting basis that if you didn’t own that house you would have had to pay this rent. This one item alone added about $1.6 trillion, or 15% to the US GDP. Also, GDP is adjusted (downward) for inflation so, as you will see in a moment, the US badly understates its annual inflation rate which automatically inflates its GDP by about another $2.3 trillion, or about 20%. These two items alone mean the US GDP is falsely and artificially inflated by about 35%.

美国政府的一个聪明的伎俩是所谓的“估算租金”，这意味着如果你拥有一所房子，政府会将你必须支付的租金加在GDP中（但没有），如果你没有拥有那所房子，你就必须支付租金。仅这一项就增加了约1.6万亿美元，或美国GDP的15%。此外，GDP因通货膨胀而调整（向下），因此，正如你稍后会看到的那样，美国严重低估了其年度通货膨胀率，这会自动使其GDP再膨胀约2.3万亿美元，或约20%。仅这两项就意味着美国GDP被虚假和人为地夸大了约35%。

Under the imputed rent scheme above, you as a homeowner living in your home are treated as two people, one a tenant, who pays an “imputed” (fairytale) rent, and the other a landlord running a small business owning and renting the house. You as tenant pay a pretend rent which goes into the pretend GDP, and you as landlord have a pretend rental income which goes into the pretend per-capita National Income of the country. US economists claim that this “theory of imputed rent may seem more natural if one imagines the extreme case of a society where everyone raises their own food and builds their own houses; without imputation the GDP would be zero”. US government economists have produced other longer and more confusing explanations as to why this imputed rent is appropriate, but they are all nonsense. The theory is simply that if an average house would rent for $25,000 per year, this amount is added to the average income of all homeowners.

根据上述估算租金方案，作为居住在家中的房主，你被视为两个人，一个是房客，支付“估算”（童话）租金，另一个是业主，经营拥有和租赁房屋的小企业。作为房客，你支付的是计入假装GDP的假装租金，而作为房东，你拥有的是计入该国假装人均国民收入的假装租金收入。美国经济学家声称，“如果想象一个社会的极端情况，即每个人都养活自己的食物，建造自己的房子，那么这种估算租金的理论似乎更为自然；如果不进行估算，GDP将为零”。美国政府经济学家已经提出了其他更长、更令人困惑的解释，解释为什么这种估算租金是合适的，但这些都是胡说八道。理论很简单，如果一栋房子的平均租金为每年25000美元，那么这一数额将计入所有房主的平均收入。

Per Capita Income

人均收入

The figure most often for the median per capita income in the US is around $35,000, and an average per capita income of around $55,00, figures that come straight from fantasyland. First, the ‘imputed rent’ I mentioned above is entered not only in the GDP (where it accounts for nearly 10%) but also in the figures for average national income, meaning that the income of every homeowner is inflated by his non-existent ‘rental income’. I could find no reliable figures for the actual amount of imputed rent included in the national income averages, but removing this single fictitious amount would potentially lower the real US per-capita average income to about $35,000. Other fictious amounts reduce it further.

美国人均收入中位数最常见的数字是35000美元左右，平均人均收入约55000美元，这些数字直接来自梦幻世界。首先，我上面提到的“估算租金”不仅计入GDP（占GDP的近10%），还计入国民平均收入，这意味着每个房主的收入都会因其不存在的“租金收入”而膨胀。我无法找到国民收入平均数中包含的估算租金实际金额的可靠数字，但除去这一单一的虚构金额，可能会将美国实际人均收入降至35000美元左右。其他虚构金额会进一步降低这一数字。

As one intelligent internet poster wrote, “Like so much else about America, the nation’s wealth and high annual incomes are just another myth, and suddenly so much of the dissonant information we receive about the US begins to make sense – the documented stories of rampant poverty across the nation, middle-class households having to live on credit to maintain their deteriorating standard of living, deferred retirements, bankruptcies.”

正如一张智能互联网海报所写， “与美国的其他许多情况一样，美国的财富和高年收入只是另一个神话，突然之间，我们收到的关于美国的许多不和谐的信息开始变得有意义了——记录在案的关于全国范围内贫困猖獗的故事，中产阶级家庭不得不靠信贷生活来维持日益恶化的生活水平，推迟退休，破产s、

Exactly correct. An increasingly small minority of the US population is indeed doing well, while an increasingly large number are living in poverty and slums, are going bankrupt, cannot find a job, cannot afford to retire, are dependent for their daily survival on government handouts, and can no longer afford to go to the doctor. But the propaganda machine persists in promulgating a false image of a shining mansion on a hill.

完全正确。美国人口中越来越少的人确实过得很好，而越来越多的人生活在贫困和贫民窟中，濒临破产，找不到工作，无力退休，日常生活依靠政府救济，再也无力看病。但是，宣传机器坚持发布一个山丘上闪耀的豪宅的虚假形象。

Inflation Rate

通货膨胀率

One author noted that “If inflation in America were calculated today by the same statistical methods used prior to the 1980s, the true rate would be almost 10% higher than that stated by the US government today.” And that’s correct, but this serious mis-calculation of the CPI is fraudulent on more than one level. First, it seriously deceives Americans as to the state of the economy, deflecting blame from the FED and the government to the people. After unleashing the massive economic destruction in the early 1980s, the FED didn’t want the public to know how badly they’d been trashed and plundered, and so immediately implemented the production of increasingly fraudulent economic statistics with lies that have increased by the year.

一位作者指出，“如果今天美国的通货膨胀率是用20世纪80年代以前使用的相同统计方法计算的，那么真实的通货膨胀率将比今天美国政府公布的通货膨胀率高出近10%。”这是正确的，但这种严重的CPI错误计算在多个层面上都是欺诈性的。首先，它严重欺骗了美国人的经济状况，把责任从美联储和政府转移到了人民身上。20世纪80年代初，美联储发动了大规模的经济破坏，但不想让公众知道他们遭到了多大程度的破坏和掠夺，因此，美联储立即发布了越来越虚假的经济统计数据，其中的谎言逐年增加。

These false inflation statistics also involve a massive financial fraud, the theft of countless billions of dollars from the American people by their own government. The reason is that all Social Security payments, welfare and food support, and other items are linked to the rate of inflation and are legislated to increase each year to cover the actual increases in the cost of living. But since the US government deliberately understates the inflation rate by approximately 10%, all Social Security benefits have been underestimated and underpaid by this amount, compounded annually, and so Social Security, many pensions, and other payments should be about 70% higher than they are today.

这些虚假的通货膨胀统计数据还涉及大规模的金融欺诈，即本国政府从美国人民手中窃取了数不清的数十亿美元。原因是，所有社会保障付款、福利和粮食支持以及其他项目都与通货膨胀率相关，并通过立法每年增加，以弥补生活成本的实际增加。但是，由于美国政府故意将通货膨胀率低估了大约10%，所有社会保障福利都被低估了，并且支付不足，每年都会增加复利，因此社会保障、许多养老金和其他付款应该比现在高出70%左右。

In the calculation of inflation and the consumer price index (CPI), US government statisticians have been so innovative they’ve had to create separate categories to contain all their fraudulent calculations. Here are a few:

在计算通货膨胀和消费者价格指数（CPI）时，美国政府统计人员非常创新，他们不得不创建单独的类别来包含他们所有的欺诈性计算。以下是一些：

(1) Exclusions:

（1）除外责任：

US officials realised the easiest way to lower the quoted CPI was to simply omit items, so they invented a measure they called “core inflation”. That should mean the central or most important portions of price increases, those most critical to consumers, but no. The US definition excludes precisely these critical items like food and fuel, eliminating the most important items from the inflation statistics, thereby creating a totally false picture. Measuring inflation without food and energy is almost the same as measuring inflation after you subtract all the inflation.

美国官员意识到，降低所报CPI最简单的方法就是省略项目，因此他们发明了一种称为“核心通胀”的措施。这应该意味着价格上涨的核心或最重要部分，那些对消费者最关键的部分，但不是。美国的定义精确地排除了食品和燃料等关键项目，从通货膨胀统计数据中删除了最重要的项目，从而创造了一个完全错误的画面。在没有食物和能源的情况下测量通货膨胀几乎与减去所有通货膨胀后测量通货膨胀相同。

(2) Substitution:

（2）替代品：

Then, they imagined what they termed a “substitution effect”, meaning that when beef prices rise the public will cease purchasing beef and buy chicken instead. That part is true, but the cleverness is their conclusion that since we are no longer buying beef, they can remove it from the inflation calculations. So now, when the price of something rises, the US Labor Department just eliminates it from the calculations and substitutes something cheaper. Voilà, no inflation. But of course it’s all a lie. The US Farm Bureau measures the increasing prices of the identical basket of goods and the difference is large: For example, from 2007 to 2008, the Labor Department reported inflation of only 4.1%, while the real inflation reported by the FB was 11.3%.

然后，他们设想了他们所称的“替代效应”，即当牛肉价格上涨时，公众将停止购买牛肉，转而购买鸡肉。这一部分是正确的，但聪明的是，他们的结论是，既然我们不再购买牛肉，他们可以将牛肉从通胀计算中剔除。因此，现在，当某件商品的价格上涨时，美国劳工部只会将其从计算中剔除，而代之以更便宜的商品。对了，没有通货膨胀。当然，这都是谎言。美国农业局（US Farm Bureau）对同一篮子商品的上涨价格进行了衡量，结果差异很大：例如，2007年至2008年，劳工部报告的通胀率仅为4.1%，而联邦调查局报告的实际通胀率为11.3%。

(3) Geometric Weighting:

（3）几何权重：

Another clever trick is to arbitrarily reduce the severity of price increases when some prices are increasing rapidly, as oil prices often do. The government ruled that if an item’s price rises “too quickly”, people will use less of it, so with any rapid price increase, the US government reduces its weighting in the CPI calculation. For example, health care is about 17% of GDP but it was given a weighting of only 6% because real health costs are rising. This alone reduces the US CPI by several percentage points. For both of the above, it should be clear that the US government is not recording actual price increases – in other words, real inflation – but is instead recording fictitious consumer behavior in the face of strong price increases.

另一个聪明的伎俩是，当某些价格快速上涨时，任意降低价格上涨的严重程度，正如油价通常所做的那样。政府规定，如果某一商品的价格“上涨太快”，人们会减少使用，因此，随着价格的快速上涨，美国政府会降低其在CPI计算中的权重。例如，医疗保健约占GDP的17%，但由于实际医疗成本不断上升，其权重仅为6%。仅此一项就将美国CPI降低了几个百分点。对于上述两种情况，应该清楚的是，美国政府没有记录实际的价格上涨——换句话说，实际的通货膨胀——而是记录了面对强劲价格上涨时的虚拟消费者行为。

(4) Hedonics:

（4）享乐主义：

This machination makes arbitrary adjustments for assumed quality improvements in goods and services. As an example, a home appliance may have been priced at $400 but experienced a minor improvement in a subsequent model year. Officials arbitrarily assumed the improvement was worth $150 and the basic appliance was now only $250, and then used that figure in calculating the CPI, showing a 40% decrease in appliance prices while in fact the price was unchanged. This kind of adjustment is now applied to almost 50% of all items contained in the calculation of the US CPI.

这种配合会对商品和服务的假定质量改进进行任意调整。例如，家用电器的价格可能为400美元，但在随后的车型年中略有改进。官员们武断地假设改进值为150美元，基本家电现在只有250美元，然后用这个数字计算CPI，显示家电价格下降了40%，而实际上价格没有变化。这种调整现在适用于美国CPI计算中几乎50%的所有项目。

Unemployment

失业

In July of 2013, Mortimer Zuckerman wrote a thoughtful and informed article for the WSJ titled “The Full-Time Scandal of Part-Time America”[1] in which he, a little too gently, devastated the US government’s unemployment statistics by pointing out that the almost 300,000 ‘new jobs’ created in June of that year were mostly smoke, in that full-time jobs plunged by well over 500,000 while part-time labor increased by about 800,000, a distinction the Labor Bureau found unworthy of mention. Low-paying jobs now account for almost half of all employment growth and even with that, less than 60% of Americans have a job of any kind. In one month, the US government listed a large number of new jobs in retail trade, but that was clearly impossible when major retailers like J.C. Penny, Macy’s, Sears, and the dollar store chains were all in trouble and closing stores, and shopping centers were so desperate for tenants they were renting space by the day or the hour. Zuckerman noted that, after Obama’s health care act mandated the provision of health insurance to all those working more than 30 hours per week, companies immediately cut workers’ hours to less than 30, often dividing one full-time job into two part-time jobs, to avoid that benefit cost.

2013年7月，莫蒂默•扎克曼（Mortimer Zuckerman）为《华尔街日报》（WSJ）撰写了一篇深思熟虑且见多识广的文章，题为“兼职美国全职丑闻”[1]，他在文章中稍微过于温和地破坏了美国政府的失业统计数据，指出当年6月创造的近30万个“新工作岗位”大多是烟尘，全职工作减少了50多万份，兼职工作增加了约80万份，劳工局认为这一区别不值得一提。现在，低薪工作几乎占所有就业增长的一半，即使如此，仍不到60%的美国人拥有任何类型的工作。在一个月内，美国政府列出了零售业的大量新工作岗位，但当大型零售商如J.C.Penny、Macy’s、Sears和美元连锁店都陷入困境并关闭店铺，购物中心非常渴望租户，他们按日或按小时租用空间时，这显然是不可能的。扎克曼指出，在奥巴马的医疗法案规定向每周工作超过30小时的所有人提供医疗保险后，公司立即将员工的工作时间减少到30小时以下，通常将一份全职工作分为两份兼职工作，以避免这种福利成本。

Dave Kranzler wrote that “The US employment report is probably the most deceptively fraudulent report produced by the Government”.[2] The US government has gone through contortions every month since 2008, attempting to delude the population about a non-existent ‘recovery’ that it falsely claims occurred in 2009. In spite of all the hype, the truth is that the US economy is still sitting on the bottom pretty much where it was in 2008, with no recovery of any kind and no net new jobs created. The publicity about the creation of ‘service jobs’ and ‘health-care jobs’ is disguising low-paid employment for retail clerks and home-care for the elderly, and the unemployment statistics have suffered the same kind of creativity as has the CPI – if a category proves troublesome or embarrassing, the government simply omits it from the calculations.

Dave Kranzler写道，“美国就业报告可能是政府发布的最具欺骗性的欺诈性报告”。[2]自2008年以来，美国政府每个月都在进行扭曲，试图欺骗民众，让他们相信2009年发生了不存在的“复苏”。尽管如此，事实是，美国经济仍处于2008年的底部，没有任何复苏，也没有创造新的净就业机会。关于创造“服务性工作”和“医疗保健工作”的宣传掩盖了零售店员的低收入就业和老年人的家庭护理，失业统计数据也受到了与CPI相同的创造性影响——如果某一类别被证明是麻烦或尴尬的，政府只需在计算中忽略它。

The US government has no qualms about massaging and rearranging numbers and categories to produce results, however inaccurate and dishonest, that place the US in the lead. In November of 2014, Glenn Kessler reported in the Washington Post Obama’s claim before Congressional leaders that “As I travel to Asia for the G-20 Summit, I’m going to be able to say that we’ve actually created more jobs here in the United States than every other advanced country combined”, a claim that was of course false. His definition of advanced nations omitted all those that were actually growing instead of retracting, nations like China, Russia, Brazil, India, Indonesia and Mexico. Perhaps his most dishonest position was to omit the fact that professional and middle-class full-time employment for educated people have disappeared at an alarming rate, with only unappealing part-time minimum-wage clerking positions being created, on which families cannot survive without welfare and food stamps. Kessler noted that his claim of the US having created 6 million “new” jobs compares to China alone having created more than 50 million new jobs since 2010. He ended his article with the comment that “One has to marvel at the clever economists in the White House who managed to slice and dice the numbers to come up with (these ‘facts’).”

美国政府毫不犹豫地修改和重新安排数字和类别，以产生让美国处于领先地位的结果，无论多么不准确和不诚实。2014年11月，格伦·凯斯勒（Glenn Kessler）在《华盛顿邮报》（Washington Post）上报道了奥巴马向国会领导人发表的声明，称“当我前往亚洲参加20国集团峰会时，我将能够说，我们在美国创造的就业岗位实际上超过了所有其他发达国家的总和”，这一说法当然是错误的。他对发达国家的定义忽略了中国、俄罗斯、巴西、印度、印度尼西亚和墨西哥等所有实际增长而非收缩的国家。也许他最不诚实的立场是忽略了这样一个事实，即受过教育的人的专业和中产阶级全职工作以惊人的速度消失了，只创造了不吸引人的兼职最低工资办事员职位，没有福利和食品券，家庭就无法生存。凯斯勒指出，他声称美国创造了600万个“新”就业岗位，而自2010年以来，仅中国就创造了5000多万个新就业岗位。他在文章的结尾写道，“人们不得不惊叹白宫里那些聪明的经济学家，他们能够把数字切分切分得出（这些“事实”）。

Jim Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, in an interview on CNBC, called the US government’s unemployment figures “a big lie”,[3] explaining that “If you perform a minimum of one hour of work in a week and are paid at least $20 … you’re not officially counted as unemployed. If you have a degree in chemistry or math and are working 10 hours part time because it is all you can find… the government doesn’t count you.”

盖洛普首席执行官吉姆·克利夫顿（Jim Clifton）在接受美国全国广播公司财经频道（CNBC）采访时称，美国政府的失业数字是“一个大谎言”，[3] 解释说：“如果你每周至少工作一个小时，工资至少20美元……你不会被正式算作失业。如果你有化学或数学学位，并且兼职工作10个小时，因为这是你能找到的一切……政府不把你算在内。

To further emphasise the perilous state of the US economy and labor picture today, only 60% of employable workers in the US have jobs. According to the government’s own statistics, a full 40% of all working-age citizens have no employment, but officials still claim an unemployment rate of only 6%. To add to the labor catastrophe, it has been reported that the fastest-growing segment of the US workforce is those aged 65-75, people who should be retired but who cannot live on their meager pensions and unaffordable health care and must sacrifice their retirement years and return to the workforce in order to survive.

为了进一步强调当今美国经济和劳动力状况的危险状态，美国只有60%的可就业工人有工作。根据政府自己的统计，40%的工作年龄公民没有工作，但官员们仍然声称失业率只有6%。此外，据报道，美国劳动力中增长最快的部分是年龄在65-75岁之间的人，他们应该退休，但不能靠微薄的养老金和负担不起的医疗保健生活，为了生存，他们必须牺牲退休年数，重返劳动力队伍。

I suppose this commentary wouldn’t be complete without reference to China’s numbers, at least from the American point of view. For any country, economic statistics are acceptable if the Americans like the numbers, otherwise they are “unreliable”, the accusation substituting as proof. With China’s economic statistics, the US government doesn’t like the numbers and so dismisses China’s statisticians as “untrained” and their statistics as “unreliable”, the accusations once again substituting as proof. However, the US FED (and other notable economists) conducted their own analysis of China’s economic statistics and confirmed that the country’s actual growth was in line with the official numbers.

我认为，至少从美国的角度来看，如果不参考中国的数字，这篇评论就不完整。对于任何国家来说，如果美国人喜欢这些数字，经济统计数据都是可以接受的，否则它们就“不可靠”，以指控代替证据。对于中国的经济统计数据，美国政府不喜欢这些数字，因此认为中国的统计人员“未经培训”，他们的统计数据“不可靠”，这些指控再次成为证据。然而，美国联邦储备委员会（和其他著名经济学家）对中国的经济统计数据进行了自己的分析，并确认该国的实际增长与官方数字相符。

China’s statisticians produce their numbers for the Chinese, not for the Americans, so they don’t bother explaining their methodology and thus leaving the Americans in the dark, craving many juicy details of China’s economy that cannot be easily derived from the gross statistical numbers. And when the Americans call, nobody will respond to their questions so they accuse the Chinese of being “unreliable”, of fudging the numbers, of exaggerating, of maybe having “two sets of books” so the government can know “what is really going on” with the economy. According to Mark Magnier of the Wall Street Journal (where else?), a new set of good numbers “raised fresh doubt about the trustworthiness of China’s own statistics”, with Citibank helpfully chiming in with “Growth Likely Overstated”, and some unbiased Western ‘researchers’ claiming the numbers were inflated by nearly 100%. Again, accusations equivalent to proof.

中国的统计学家为中国人而不是美国人提供数据，因此他们不必费心解释他们的方法，从而让美国人蒙在鼓里，他们渴望了解中国经济的许多有趣细节，而这些细节不能轻易从总统计数据中得出。当美国人打来电话时，没有人会回答他们的问题，所以他们指责中国人“不可靠”，捏造数字，夸大事实，也许有“两套书”，这样政府就可以知道经济的“真实情况”。据《华尔街日报》（Wall Street Journal）的马克·马尼耶（Mark Magnier）称，一组新的好数据“让人对中国自身统计数据的可信度产生了新的怀疑”，花旗银行（Citibank）乐于提出“增长可能过度”的说法，一些不偏不倚的西方“研究人员”声称这些数字被夸大了近100%。同样，指控等同于证据。

But the real purpose of these attacks was illuminated by an economics professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Carsten Holz, a man who even wrote a paper on “the quality” of China’s GDP statistics, who said Chinese statistics suffer from “an atrocious lack of transparency”. That statement would translate loosely as “We want to know more, but they won’t tell us because (a) they believe it is none of our damned business and (b) they think we will find ways to use their numbers against them.” Correct on both counts.

但香港科技大学（Hong Kong University of Science and Technology）经济学教授卡斯滕·霍尔茨（Carsten Holz）阐明了这些攻击的真正目的，他甚至写了一篇关于中国GDP统计数据“质量”的论文，称中国统计数据“极度缺乏透明度”。这句话大致可以理解为“我们想知道更多，但他们不会告诉我们，因为（a）他们认为这不关我们的事，（b）他们认为我们会找到方法利用他们的数字来反对他们。”。

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

罗曼诺夫的作品已被翻译成32种语言，他的文章发表在30多个国家的150多个外语新闻和政治网站上，以及100多个英语平台上。拉里·罗曼诺夫是一位退休的管理顾问和商人。他曾在国际咨询公司担任高级行政职务，并拥有国际进出口业务。他曾任上海复旦大学客座教授，向高级EMBA班介绍国际事务案例研究。罗曼诺夫先生住在上海，目前正在写一系列与中国和西方有关的十本书。他是辛西娅·麦金尼（Cynthia McKinney）新集《当中国打喷嚏时》（When China Sneeezes）的特约作者之一。（第二章——对付恶魔）。

His full archive can be seen at

他的完整文章库可以在以下看到

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

他的联系方式：

2186604556@qq.com

Notes

注释

[1] The Full-Time Scandal of Part-Time America

[1] 兼职美国的全职丑闻

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mortimer-zuckerman-the-full-time-scandal-of-part-time-america-1405291652

[2] The Non-Farm Payroll Report: The BLS Outright Embarrasses Itself