Meine Antwort an die besorgten Leser, die mich ab und zu daran erinnern, dass es hier um Daten geht …. :

If a CEO issued the kind of distorted figures put out by politicians and scientists, he’d wind up in prison, Ex-Bush Economic Advisors CEO, Michael Boskin, slams politicians for cooking the economic books to obfuscate economic conditions.
Politicians and scientists who don’t like what their data show lately have simply taken to changing the
numbers. They believe that their end—socialism, global climate regulation, health-care legislation,
repudiating debt commitments, la gloire française—justifies throwing out even minimum standards of
accuracy. It appears that no numbers are immune: not GDP, not inflation, not budget, not job or cost
estimates, and certainly not temperature. A CEO or CFO issuing such massaged numbers would land in
jail…
There is historical precedent for a “socialist GDP.” When President George H.W. Bush sent me to
help Mikhail Gorbachev with economic reform, I found out that the Soviet statistics office kept two sets of books: those they published, and those they actually believed (plus another for Stalin when he was alive)..
America has not been immune from this dangerous numbers game. Every president is guilty of
spinning unpleasant statistics. President Richard Nixon even thought there was a conspiracy against him at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But President Barack Obama has taken it to a new level. His laudable attempt at transparency in counting the number of jobs “created or saved” by the stimulus bill has degenerated into farce and was just junked this week.
The administration has introduced the new notion of “jobs saved” to take credit where none was ever
taken before. It seems continually to confuse gross and net numbers…
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704586504574654261655183416.html