In his op-ed, you’re right. He’s a political hack. But that’s what sells newspapers. Nobody outside of the academic world wants to read economics with statistics, models, and observations.
–yet. We’ll see how the Obama administration (or other) reacts once the crap really starts to hit the fan.
But the reporting of numbers we have now are a government manipulated fantasy, too. Given that I think we’ve expanded our currency base much, much more and for much, much longer (with the dollar “reserve currency” status), even if the numbers aren’t as screwed up as they may have been during the depression (which I’ve not seen evidence of), this isn’t very encouraging.