But peel back to the real numbers and they seem to make very little economic sense.
Whatever the real numbers, 2006 seems to have been the worst for many years, if not ever.
The real numbers for this February will not be reported until March 2014.
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But no one, including the Republicans, is talking about the real numbers.
What is important in the poll is the revelation that so many Americans are completely in the dark when it comes to the real numbers.
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If Wall Street predicted that Enron would earn 30 cents a share, by God, Enron's gonna earn 31 cents a share no matter what the real numbers were.
So, if Congress wishes to outlaw medical malpractice as a way of lowering the cost of healthcare, they are going to take a lot of heat as the real numbers become available to the public and we all discover that completely doing away with medical malpractice suits would, at best, have a negligible impact on our problem.
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"For a lot of the students, the first time they actually get exposed to the real financial numbers on the farm may be through this class, " Moore said.
Beyond whether or not the numbers are real is the question of what those numbers would actually prove even if they were.
Removing the inventory build-up from the reported numbers, the real growth rate was an even more anemic 1.5%.
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Even better, by 2008 the company was also actually paying attention to the fact that we were putting real numbers on the board.
Other groups are pointing to the increase in the minimum wage, rather than the recession, as the real culprit behind the teen unemployment numbers.
The numbers are real and they portend a national financial disaster.
"The real problem with spectator numbers and media reach is that the European leagues are the leading football propositions in the region, " said Jamie Cunningham, chief executive of Professional Sports Group.
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This is the space on which all numbers, real, imaginary and combinations of the two, can be plotted.
The danger of this, of course, is that the organization tends to pursue the numbers themselves rather than actual real life results.
When the IRS began to improve its control on Social Security numbers, Hersch started using real numbers to perpetrate the same scam.
The real test will be the Q4 2012 market share numbers.
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Those who want to present the bullish view will give you sales or price numbers for real estate for the first half or the last year.
Yes, I have said several times recently that stocks are rising but the U.S. economy is not but now that the first quarter is almost over I can use real numbers that should scare anyone who believes the U.S. economy is in a sustainable accelerating recovery.
And she understands the relationship between numbers on a ledger and the lives of real people.
Care services minister Norman Lamb said the rise in suicide numbers was a "very real concern" and pledged to tackle the problem "head on".
Jobs are appearing in the economy, the report shows, but people are not out looking for them in great enough numbers to move the needle of real unemployment firmly downward.
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But a closer look at the numbers shows that the real answer is probably much higher.
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But there are stories and experiences behind these numbers that are the real deal.
With 200 million activations out there, we need more numbers to extrapolate the real state of applications.
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