I’ve been telling you for years (decades, actually) that Washington’s economic data are screwy. And because of that, the Federal Reserve and companies can’t really make informed decisions.

Bloomberg News carried a story the other day that shows the Fed’s new chairman, Jerome Powell, also has doubts about data coming out of Washington.

According to Bloomberg, Powell called upon First Data Corp., a global payment technology company, to find out how much consumers were spending. The problem is that bad weather had affected the public’s buying pattern — or might have.

So, according to this story, Powell went to the source of real-time data — credit card receipts — rather than rely on government guesstimates.

And this, I think, raises a good point. Why is Uncle Sam still in the data gathering business when there are much better ways to collect information in this technology-rich age we live in?

Why spend all that money to get information that’s collected in the same way as before the invention of the computer and internet?

I’ll rant on this some more soon. But that’s my mini-rant for the day.