Quick, Hide The Data!

By Cernig

If your economy is tanking and it's your policies that are to blame, what do you do?

Well, if you're the Bush administration, you drop all that bad news down the memory hole.

Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. As Forbes explains, the government site provides an invaluable service to the public for accessing U.S. economic data:

This site is maintained by the Economics and Statistics Administration and combines data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, like GDP and net imports and exports, and the Census Bureau, like retail sales and durable goods shipments. The site simply links to the relevant department’s Web site. This might not seem like a big deal, but doing it yourself–say, trying to find retail sales data on the Census Bureau’s site–is such an exercise in futility that it will convince you why this portal is necessary.

Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1.

This was the only government website that centralised all the data on economic indicators, so now if you want to find out how the economy is doing you're going to have to work harder at finding out. Or you could subscribe to the email list and the government will charge you money to find out how they're handling your economy.