You need a highly developed sense of humor to follow the stock market these days. You need an even more developed taste for exotic fun to cope with pronouncements coming from the Fed and other official sources of financial and economic wisdom. At about this time most months, however, when inflation numbers and their interpretation are made public. even those of us well used to laughing through our tears are hard-pressed not to race panting to the liquor cabinet for solace.

For this is the time of month when inflation numbers are made public.

To begin with, these numbers are understated to an absurd extent. They have little relationship to what it actually costs real people in the real United States to live.

They have been systematically and deliberately finagled over the years to appear better than they are by giving more weight to things that tend to inflate less, while excluding increased daily costs almost all of us are paying. Prominent in this latter category are things like fees atop the stated prices actually tracked for inflation purposes — bank fees, airline fees, all the nickel and diming that so many other businesses now use to boost their bottom lines at their customers’ expense.

Even with this flagrant rigging employed to understate official inflation, the numbers that come up are still awful. Official inflation in this country (based on the CPI) for fiscal 2011 was 3.6 percent. Wholesale inflation for fiscal 2011 was 6.9 percent. These are terrible numbers.

Or are they? The Fed and most others in Economistland, that alternate universe where the recession ended in 2009, have a “preferred measure of inflation” that still looks lousy but not quite as lousy as the CPI. In this alternative universe the rising costs of food and energy are excluded from serious consideration (and worry) because they are “volatile,” and what remains is labeled the “core rate of inflation,” the Fed’s “preferred measure.”

The CPI measure rose another .03 percent last month, but this core rate went up a measly ,01 percent. And so the Wall Street Journal and other purveyors of official truth could headline: “Underlying Inflation Tame.”

Here’s what drives me so crazy about this ongoing, cheap shot deception. It isn’t working! Everyone who doesn’t dwell in that alternate universe, Economistland, understands that inflation is a serious problem that is seriously undermining a growing number of people’s ability to live reasonably comfortable lives.

This very widely shared understanding is adding mightily to a widely shared and fast growing disdain for official pronouncements of all kinds. You lie to us on this, you tell us regularly to our faces something we know is a crock, and that’s how we come to view everything else that you tell us, much of which might by truthful and worth believing.

Sometimes official lying is necessary. But you lay it on too thick, too often, you rub too many people’s noses in the same lies month after month, and the game stops being worth playing for everyone.

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