Lying With Factual Statistics

 Statistics are the best way to lie while reporting factual data.

Prices and wages for example vary over time.  Generally wages go up mare regularly but prices can have big decreases as well as increases.

So when the economy got disrupted a lot of prices fell as inventories needed to be sold off.  Some items became hard to get as demand for retail paper products didn't offset the fall in commercial products of the same type.

Pandemic restrictions led to any number of odd outcomes but there was less demand for many items while some had increased demand.

As we saw demand pick up and since production was reduced we started to see shortages.  Now we like to report statistics a certain way, so for example we saw significant inflation in October measure against last October.  That is factual.  

Now what do we know about last October?  Well ithad sen demand drop due to covid but otherwise not much.  We had seen during the pandemic signifcant decreases n some prices.  Inflation last October was reported at 1.18%.  Economists think 2%inflation is a healthy number.  

So are we in some sort of inflationary crisis?  Certainly not but it gives news people something to talk about.  That leads to some fairly wild speculation about causes. 

For example, stopping construction on a pipeline not yet in production does not impact it because, well it wasn't operational yet.  That could impact the future but it depends on whether the output has another way to get to market and if we even need the output.  

One of the things that I think isn't being covered is our labor shortages.  Many of our food industries are labor intensive and they need seasonal workers.  Seasonal workers have been disrupted via recent immigration policies.

Still a fairly short term increase in some prices is not a crisis for most people.

For some we have been in crisis mode already.