Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
|
Blogroll
Friends
CT Politics Politics
Technology
West Hartford Blogs Hartford Blogs |
Active Posts
|
|
Track & Validate
|
In case you didn’t get the memo, Dennis Hastert, Speaker of The House of Representatives, is taking responsibility for something involving the scandal surrounding former representative Mark Foley. Not that I’m really sure what it is exactly that he is taking responsibility for, since he hasn’t really been clear on that. I’m sure he isn’t taking responsibility for Foley’s conduct and he is denying he knew anything, so I guess he is taking responsibility for not knowing that he didn’t know anything…
But I digress. He isn’t going to resign over this. Even is you don’t think he should, one would have to agree that this whole “responsibility thing” is getting out of hand. In the real world, when you screw up and are responsible, something is done. Even if you don’t get fired, the factors related to the error are identified and the problem is addressed. Corrective action is taken in an attempt to prevent a similar error from occurring again. Just saying “Oops! My bad” isn’t enough.
The problem is that there is no fixing or error correction going on. No one has identified a communication problem or an area where someone took improper action (at least not where there is general agreement). Just like Donald Rumsfeld, 2 years ago, taking responsibility is meaningless. There are no consequences and most importantly there are no changes being made. Nothing is being done to correct the breakdown in the system and, most critically, nothing is being done to prevent this or any similar problem from occurring. The goal is to let people point fingers for a bit and then hope the story dies.
This kind of crap would never fly in the business world, so why do we allow it go on in our government? Just like hollow promises, hollow “responsibility” doesn’t do anything but deflect focus and prevent actual change from occurring, while protecting the person’s position. Fight back! Vote the bastard out!
Ok, like we didn’t know that to begin with. But this is really too much for me. Look at these two pictures and see if you can find “the mistakes.”
More attempts to “rewrite” history?
