Policy and regulation

Rules that move public money are written down, and so are the statistics they are indexed to. This section treats both as mechanics: who is obliged to publish what, on which schedule, computed by which formula, and what the formula counts. That means reading tax lines and statutory deductions as they appear on the return rather than as they appear in a summary, and treating a revision to an official series as a fact about the series.

The questions that follow are deliberately narrow: which rent the shelter component of a price index is actually measuring, where a dollar of federal revenue is recorded as spent, and who is entitled to say that a downturn has begun. None of the three is settled by a headline figure, and none of them is a matter of taste — each has a committee, a form or a formula behind it, and that is what the material describes. Dates shown on this page are the date of publication and the date of the last revision.