There's an old saying that no one should ever see how laws or sausages are made. I'll add to that: Nobody should know how the government comes up with its retail sales figures.
But I'm going to tell you anyway because the sales figures that were put out last week were so arbitrary, so random, so ridiculous -- yet so important.
Last week the Census Bureau announced that retail sales for October increased a very healthy 0.8 percent from the previous month and were up 4.3 percent compared with those of October 2015.
Wall Street was expecting a 0.6 percent increase for October.
But there was a lot less meat in that 0.8 percent than you might think. ...
... For the remainder of the report:
http://nypost.com/2016/11/21/census-numbers-a...-harm-is-rea...
