Down the memory hole

[captainsblog]

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" is usually listed as the third biggest lie of all time after "I love you" and "the check is in the mail." Today, though, we mourn the loss of something from the government that actually was here to help us- and which got stamped out for, most likely, that very reason.

Forbes magazine- hardly a bastion of the "drive-by" liberal media- actually selected a government website when it compiled its Best of the Web directory. This one, with the easy-to-remember name of economicindicators.gov, was beloved, not for any original content, but simply for putting virtually all important U.S. economic data in a single, updated location. It also allowed the reader to have updates on these reports emailed to them.

Simple. Useful. Unspinnable. And so, naturally, as of March 1st, pushing up the daisies- due to "budgetary constraints".

How expensive could it be to have one civil servant uploading links and maintaining the server? Or did it maybe have something to do with not wanting to enable the bearing of such bad economic tidings in an election year?

It's easy to blame Bush for this kind of stupidity, but it's by no means innately Republican. This news reminded me of a similar aversion to bad news displayed back in the granddaddy of all such eras, the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter. Then, as now, government economists struggled with the effects of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which tended to bring on the ill effects of a recession merely by one of them mentioning the word "recession." Rather than suppress the news, though, Carter's economic czar (and occasional Cornell professor of my day) Alfred Kahn came up with a much more elegant solution. Kahn

was strictly instructed by the White House not  to utter the "R-word" (recession) in Congressional testimony he was about to give. So, when inevitably asked by the good Representatives whether the economy was in a recession, he replied faithfully that he could not say that, but that it was in his view in "a banana." (Subsequently, following complaints by banana industry lobbyists, he changed the term to "kumquat," presumably a fruit with less vocal representation in Washington.)

So if you ever hear Bernanke talking about "the worst kumquat you've ever seen," sell.

Comments

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

I could make a horrible joke about us all being in this together, kumquat may.... Whoops, too late, I said it, didn't I? Damn those Republican tongues are fast.