Don’t Replace Data With Ideology

Argentina’s government regularly publishes false data on the country’s inflation rate. Greece lied about the size of its budget deficit. Believe it or not, the U.S. is headed down a path that could ultimately make similar shenanigans possible in the world’s largest economy.

In various parts of the world, politicians are waging war on the economic statistics that help people assess the performance of their leaders. Over the past few years, the Argentine government has reported inflation rates more than a dozen percentage points below private-sector estimates, and has filed criminal charges against statisticians attempting to publish their own data. Late last year, Greece launched a criminal investigation of the head of its statistical agency for reporting larger budget deficits than the government deemed appropriate (or, as he put it, for “not cooking the books”).