fake government data – The Burning Platform

Guest Post by Steve Kirsch

In this article, I will show you why government data is not trustable. That is why I personally prefer anecdotes that are verifiable when trying to figure out what is really going on.

**Figure 1.** Record level data available here. You can FINALLY see what is really going on in those homes that are making honest reports. And you can see how a few problematic reports can skew the numbers.

Executive summary

The point of this article is to show you why US government data cannot be trusted as being accurate.

I’m going to show you how you can show that the CMS Nursing Home Data, which is supposed to be the gold standard, is crap with just 3 examples.

Basically, the rule I use is if you cannot independently verify the numbers they are telling you are correct, you should not believe the numbers are correct.

This is why I prefer data, such as anecdotes, where you can independently verify the evidence with multiple sources.

Continue reading “Why you can’t trust the US government data”

by Tyler Durden

Ever since 2012 we have warned that one of the biggest threats arising from the US student loan bubble – which is no longer disputed by anyone except perhaps members of the outgoing administration – is not that it is soaring at an unprecedented pace, that’s obvious for anyone with the latest loan total number over $1.4 trillion, rising at a pace of nearly $100 billion per year, but that the government – either on purpose or due to honest miscalculation – was not correctly accounting for the true extent of delinquencies and defaults. Today, we finally got confirmation that, as speculated, the US government was indeed fabricating student loan default data, making it appear far lower than it was in reality.

An the WSJ reported overnight “many more students have defaulted on or failed to pay back their college loans than the U.S. government previously believed.”

The admission came last Friday, when the Education Department released a memo saying that it had overstated student loan repayment rates at most colleges and trade schools and provided updated numbers. This also means that the number of loan defaults in various cohorts is far greater than previously revealed.

A spokeswoman for the Education Department said that the problem resulted from a “technical programming error.”

And so, the infamous “glitch” strikes again.

How bad was the data fabrication? When The Wall Street Journal analyzed the new numbers, the data revealed that the Department previously had inflated the repayment rates for 99.8% of all colleges and trade schools in the country. In other words, virtually every single number was made to appear better than it actually was. And people mock China for its own “fake data.”

Continue reading “US Government Caught Massively Fabricating Student Loan Default Data”