As our economy continues to stumble, the housing crisis deepens and our national debt skyrockets the government has decided to try to sweep it all under the rug. The Bush Administration will shut down the popular economicindicators.gov on March 1 because of "budgetary constraints."

The site, administered by the Economics and Statistics Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce, is widely used by academics, economists and reporters. It is invaluable towards an informed public understanding of the state of our economy. It links data from a wide variety of Government agencies such as the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis to allow easy access to government data. One great feature of the site is email notification when selected agencies or departments issue new reports.

When it announced the site's imminent closure The Department of Commerce offered "a free quarterly subscription to STAT-USA®/Internet/" When this temporary subscription runs out, anyone wishing to continue to receive the email will have to pay a fee. It is difficult to believe that in order to receive timely information collected by public agencies, one would have to pay. Especially for email notification.

That "budgetary constraints" are the stated reason for shutting down the site is particularly disingenuous. The cost of running a website is minimal. Further, Bush has recently submitted the largest budget request in history.

This is not the first time in recent history that economic data has been removed from the public sphere. In March 2006, the Federal Reserve stopped publishing M3 (a broad measure of money supply.) This action did 2 things: it hid from view the total reserve holdings in dollars of other nations and major banks and it allowed for a fiat currency with no oversight. This is dangerous because it could allow the government to create money at whim, driving down the value of the entire system.

After the Bureau of Labor Statistics published startling data about factory closings in the U.S., the administration stopped publishing this information.

These are just 2 examples. Many more are cataloged here.

As our economy worsens I'm reminded of a book I read about the Great Depression. It was a collection of news articles from the time. It was striking to read about the struggles that people faced and to contrast those articles with ones about the government response. The federal government tried to ignore the catastrophe and hide it from view. By the time they focused on the problem and passed legislation to address it, many believe that the worst was already over. I would hope that we could expect better 80 years later but I'm afraid that these efforts to hide public information from the people is evidence of the federal government's desire to keep our heads in the sand while they continue with policies that further increase wealth disparity and transfer public funds to war profiteers. All while shipping our jobs overseas and dismantling the social safety net. If we want economic security, we need to continue work at the local level. Supporting local businesses and using local currency are two good steps but we're all going to have to be creative and work together to get through the looming economic storm.