Turkiye: Shoot the messenger

Per France24:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sacked [Sait Erdal Dincer,] the head of the state statistics agency, according to a decree published Saturday, after releasing data showing last year’s inflation rate hit a 19-year high of 36.1 percent.

The 2021 inflation figure released by Dincer angered both the pro-government and opposition camps.
The opposition said it was underreported, claiming that the real cost of living increases were at least twice as high. [Emphasis in original.]

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220129-turkey-s-erdogan…

Rather than make both the pro-government and opposition parties angry, the next Turkish statistics chief ought to simply exclude from the calculation those items which directly impose the most pain and incite heated protests among the hoi polloi. That’s what government officials in America do.

[In the US, official] Core inflation is the change in the costs of goods and services but does not include those from the food and energy sectors. This measure of inflation excludes these items because their prices are much more volatile. It is most often calculated using the consumer price index (CPI), which is a measure of prices for goods and services.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/coreinflation.asp

By ignoring or denying the existence of exponential increases in the price people pay to feed their children, heat their homes, and operate their vehicles, government bureaucrats make sure that politicians can “plausibly deny” knowledge of the conditions under which voters actually live.

In the USA, so long as the scriptwriters on the TV news and the editors of major newspapers carefully avoid inquiring behind the “official” government statistics, anyone who dares to expose the “true” or “feels like” inflation figures can be deemed to be spreading “disinformation” and de-platformed.

Someone serving President Erdogan in his 1,150-room, 3.2 million square foot (300,000 sq meters) Presidential Palace ought to be able to train the next statistics chief to follow the US practice of manipulating words and definitions so as to assuage the anger of suffering citizens.

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Do you think other giverments are more trustworthy? If you do I have some bridges on sale. LOL

The Captain
instead of lying they call it hedonic adjustment and omit food and energy entirely because they have no impact on your spending.

Note: GM is the world leader in EVs!

Slightly used bridge on sale. Inquire within.

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The Fed even has a 16% Trimmed-Mean Consumer Price Index that excludes the CPI components that show the most extreme monthly price changes. This series excludes 8% of the CPI components with the highest and lowest one-month price changes from each tail of the price-change distribution resulting in a 16% Trimmed-Mean Inflation Estimate.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TRMMEANCPIM158SFRBCLE

Wendy

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