Speaking of stupid budget tricks, the website for the economic indicators data compiled by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, both (I believe) within the Department of Commerce, currently states that Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service (http://www.economicindicators.gov) will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008.
Now, that site was just one way that the reports are distributed. It’s a useful site for people who want the information; you can easily look at what departments have released some information today, or this week, and poke through those reports. The reports will still be released, and I suspect that it’s easy enough to get those several lists onto your aggregator, so you can still sort through today’s or this week’s reports. It will take some little doing, because there are some nineteen or so different reports, but then it’s just clicking, isn’t it? Of course, the site could provide links to the sites that will have those services and the feeds for them, which would be a lot less clicking.
And then, there’s no particular reason to believe that the service will, in fact, be discontinued. There’s a game our government plays about budgets and constraints, and this could be part of that game. There’s a sense in which it’s a disgusting game, but I’m not easily outraged by it anymore. I hope other people still are, because the game only works if people get outraged, and I’m too sick, too tired and too old to bother doing it myself. Particularly when there’s so much to be really outraged by, that I wouldn’t have to pretend about just to make the game work.
Still. Lots and lots of people think that there’s a recession a-comin’, and very few of them know what that means, and so there are all these stories in the news where people try to explain what it means, and what the leading indicators are, and the trailing indicators, and all that good stuff, and it would be nice if, in a democratic republic, there was some sense that the Administration, even if it is a secretive cabal of crooks and incompetents, is not just shutting down uncomfortable information with insouciant impunity.
Your Humble Blogger hasn’t seen this spread hither and yon through Left Blogovia, either. I know, it’s economic data, yawn city. But couldn’t somebody out there muster just enough phony enthusiasm to keep it in the game?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Oddly, I had actually seen this in left blogovia, but perhaps I frequent different places in LB than you? And now, I can’t find where I’d seen it. I did find it here, but this isn’t where I usually see such things. I forget where I did see it, though.
peace
Matt