Misery Index at 28-year high?

There's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek metric called the Misery Index, which is the sum of government-reported unemployment and government-reported inflation.

Using the official numbers, it's at a 28-year high right now.

Last time it was this high was around 1986--and in 1981 (just after Reagan took office) it was almost ten points higher than today.

But a lot of seeming math whizzes at ZeroHedge looked at the chart (click the link) and smelled a rat: "I lived through those years," said one, "and it seems to me things were far, far better then than they are today."

This got commenters wondering if the problem was just everyone's lousy memory, or whether something was wrong with the index. The conclusion was that little by little, the government's procedures for measuring "official" unemployment have changed over the years. If the rules from the 1980's were applied today, unemployment would be closer to 20 percent. For example, today people who've been unemployed for 99 weeks are no longer counted as unemployed.

Neat way to reduce "official" unemployment, huh?

Same with inflation: Over the years the government has changed the "basket" of goods and services used to compute the CPI. Critics claim some of the items added have little effect on consumers' day-to-day transactions. Over the last decade or so, the added items tend to understate the "real" rate of inflation.

Result is that the math-savvy commenters at ZH think the "real" misery index is closer to 25 or so--which would put it higher than at any time since the Great Depression.

Just don't expect any in-depth analysis of this topic in the Lying Media. Because they're all about exalting Barack, regardless of the facts.

Barack don't need no facts.