Two revelations in the last week about the economic statistics generated by the government revealed the breathtaking scope of the lies, damn lies and statistics that have been deployed to convince the American people that their economy is healthy when it is not. Scam number one, of course, is the claim that the president “manages” the economy. All you have to do is count the variables, and if you ever finish counting, you will see how preposterous this idea is. But the idea has been sold, and so every president — and all the minions who serve him — has to maintain the fiction that he’s in charge, and everything is swell.

President Trump brags daily that the economy is the best there’s ever been, that growth is the best ever – it will hit five per cent in the next quarter, he assures us — that unemployment has never been lower, the stock market has never been higher and therefore we would be idiots not to re-elect him. The industrial media are singing from the same sheet music.

It calls to mind the kings and high priests of old who claimed to manage the weather, and promised good weather to those who greased their palms. They prospered when the weather and thus the harvests were good, and when the weather changed got tossed into an active volcano. Mr. Trump is, of course, unaware of that history.

Although Mr. Trump exaggerates wildly the reporting of his own administration, the government has been relentless in supporting the idea of a vibrant economy that is growing rapidly and creating jobs — 223,000 a month throughout 2018, according to the Bureau of Labour Damn Lies. But a week ago, the aforesaid Bureau nervously cleared its throat and announced that actually, half a million of those jobs never existed. It was the largest downward revision since 2009. Do you remember 2009?

Funny thing about those downward revisions. For a lot of government statistics, the first announcement of what happened last month is an estimate — by which is meant a wild guess — based on preliminary data — by which is meant consultation with a Ouija Board. To be fair, although I don’t feel like being fair, gathering significant data on an economy the size of America’s takes time. But a nation with attention deficit disorder and short term memory loss does not have time, so the numbers are pitched out quickly. Then, month after month as real numbers comes in, they are revised, almost always downward.

So the job-creating, four-wheel-drive diesel juggernaut of the Trump years has been revised downward to a ‘63 Volkswagen Beetle with a missing spark plug. But it’s old news, so nobody cares.

The same thing has happened to the glorious GDP numbers over the same period. The gross domestic product — the sum of all the goods and services produced in the country — grew at an annual rate of 3.1% during 2018 (which the Trumpster Fire rounded to 4%, leveraging that to a promise of 5% this quarter). Now they have revised that damn lie to 2.9%, a rate just healthy enough to permit the patient to sit up in bed and take nourishment. But the first, most optimistic read on the second quarter growth rate is just a hair above 2%, hospital equivalent of a code blue.

Thus does the Wizard, aided by legions of federal public employees, keep alive the illusion of a thriving economy as it wheezes its way toward depression. But twice last week, the curtains were briefly swept aside and the all-powerful Wizard was revealed to be a sweaty little man with orange hair, desperately trying to work all the levers at once. And he looked back at us and said, “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lying eyes?”