Administration Shutting Down Economic Indicators Site

from the trending-downward... dept

Thu, Feb 14th 2008 4:48pm — Mike Masnick

While there was some decent news suggesting the economy might not be falling into a recession, there are still plenty of knowledgeable folks who think some sort of recession is likely. Last week, in New York, plenty of folks I spoke to seemed to believe we were already in one. Of course, to actually call a recession, the general consensus is that there would need to be two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. So how would you measure that growth? Well, apparently the White House would prefer to make it as difficult as possible. Reader Jon writes in to note the rather inconvenient timing of the Administration suddenly deciding to shut down its own website that aggregated economic indicators. The site, EconomicIndicators.gov had even won awards from Forbes as a great resource. The timing of the closure certainly raises some questions. It's not that difficult to manage a website (though, I recognize, in the government, all costs are multiplied by some insanity multiplier). If it's really so expensive to manage, why not throw it open and make it into a wiki? Hell, perhaps Jimbo Wales or somebody can build a WikinomicIndicators site instead.

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Filed Under: economic indicators, federal government, websites

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Cynic, 14 Feb 2008 @ 6:00pm

Loosely quoting from the movie "Blazing Saddles": Hrumph, Hrumph, we have to protect our phoney baloney jobs!!!

Hey, I didn't get a hrumph from that guy!"

Since the US government never created any wealth in this country, then all they can do is brag about what other people are creating, and when that stops, they have nothing to say.
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niftyswell, 15 Feb 2008 @ 7:32am

open call with this article
If ever an article was an open call for all the Bush haters to come out this has got to be it. Everyone line up and take a number to blame him for everything from tornadoes, the poor terrorists loss of freedom from being able to make a phone call to his bomb maker without being listened in on, meteorite impacts, to the flat tire you got yesterday! I know they call it the Bush tax cuts...but does the office of president ever really make or pass budgets? I believe he only suggests one then he only has veto power that can be overridden. He can't declare war without a vote by congress either and he had a vote that supported the two actions he took...so to blame Bush for what your locally elected political hero has time again passed and re-passed is kind of ridiculous. For the same reason I dont think anyone can give Clinton credit for the economic success and then dot.com burst of the 90's. The VP seems to have more power given the makeup of the senate on these close votes than the president does. Given all that I think the government has way more power to take away prosperity than it does to create it.
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JustMatt, 15 Feb 2008 @ 8:55am

So what?
In the big picture does it matter that a website nobody knew about in the first place is going away?
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Niftys an idiot, 15 Feb 2008 @ 12:38pm

How can anyone be so ignorant?
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Johan Hjelm, 19 Feb 2008 @ 6:45pm

So, what about the Wikinomics idea?
I thought it _is_ a great idea to put together an indicator site. Preferrably with open databases so people can do mashups (like the UN did). And from more countries than the US (data is numbers, and should be available from the statistics agencies in most countries, irrespective of the language they speak). It seems the site only lists publications of indicators, and that the indicators themselves will not go away. So it should not be too hard to create a replica, now that the governement has told us where to find the indicators. And it should be possible to include similar econometric data from other countries. With graphs and animations. Like Hans Rosling is doing with Google. http://www.google.org/inform.html. That would actually make econometrics cool. Anyone interested? Or you pepole just up to grumbling about your taxes and presidents?
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