Lies, damn lies and Trump-era labor statistics

In this week’s failure line column, Jon Allsop is filling out for Jay Caspian Kang.

During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover Labor Secretary William N. Doak told reporters that jobs are increasing nationwide. However, the reporter “was fooled by the pleasant remarks of the political consciousness secretary.” time Magazine Report. They sought a second opinion from Ethelbert Stewart, a commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who called Doak’s secretary Doak, and the statistics provided him with such a statement.” Soon after, Hoover signed a law requiring the federal government to sign with retired-age workers. Stewart was in his seventies. Doak might suggest him to make a presidential exemption, but he didn’t, so Stewart went out. according to timeMany observers in Washington smelled the rat. “Retired?” Stuart said. “Don’t say that. I have a tin that can be tied to the end of the tail of the jacket.”

As media critic Jack Shafer ObservedSince 1884, Chester A. According to internal history, the bureau “is an almost two decades of advocacy by the Labor Organization, who hopes the government will help promote and improve the status of the growing industrial workforce.” Prominent union leader Samuel Gompers suggested that if lawmakers have the ability to access hard data about them, they will not be able to ignore it. There is also a history of allegations of presidential intervention. Howard Goldstein, assistant commissioner of BLS under Richard Nixon, was suspected, was reportedly reported to have fallen unemployment. Nixon was privately angry at Goldstein, demanding that he be fired, and my colleague Fergus McIntosh It was pointed out earlier this week“Jewish Number” was then conducted at the institution. When the BLS reported a drop in unemployment before the 2012 presidential election, some Republicans suggested the department provide books for President Barack Obama’s re-approval. These critics include Donald Trump, who, as McIntosh reports, will further doubt the number of official jobs during his presidential candidate campaign, in 2015 (“our real unemployment rates are all between 18% and 20%. Get. If so, they did a very powerless job as the new numbers came out in August – two months before the election and half a month.

Last week, the agency released a job report showing anemia growth in July, while the numbers in May and June were significantly lower than the agency’s initial reports. Trump’s advisers went out of their way to lay the luster of rationality for an unreasonable decision, but Trump himself roared as always, suggesting that Mcentarfer was a Democratic guerrilla who manipulated the numbers to make him look bad. McIntosh described the shooting as “Trump turned the next step in the federal bureaucracy and the information it generated into a tool of his own authority.” Other observers agreed, highlighting the growing dictatorship of this authority and the dark moment of McEntarfer’s strike for those who value truth. On ABC, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers described it as anything Nixon had ever done. “Frauding statisticians threaten to threaten the head of the newspaper. It has to do with launching an attack on the university. It has to do with launching an attack on a law firm defending the defense of the elected boss’s found incompatible clients. It’s really something horrible.”

Everything is enough. (Well, without the “Jews”, I think it’s a good idea what Nixon actually did Once was Even worse. Even if the work report does not become Pravda Experts believe that overnight – the process of putting it together is difficult to blatantly rig – it is thought that it has been replaced by Trump’s self, or that it may undermine confidence in the economy, for example, bond markets have reduced U.S. leverage in international trade negotiations. (Trump’s actions have led to the publication of this incredible verdict this Wall Street Journal: “If the integrity of domestic data is questioned, efforts to estimate China’s economic data in China may provide a roadmap for U.S. companies.”) All of these risks can mask awkward reports of assumed employment reports, which, while not great, are hardly disastrous.

Shooting is also harmful for other reasons: An observer put it in era“Democracy cannot exist in reality without a reliable cognitive infrastructure.” In a less noble sense, from the president’s perspective, this also makes me politically meaningless behavior. Usually, doing so rebounds his advantage when Trump undermines confidence in the shared epistemology of the United States. But now that he is back in office, he finds that it is not always the case. (Photo A: In some way still In progress Epstein Imbroglio. ) Doubts about official macroeconomic data don’t seem to work for him; Trump should know better than anyone else, riding this wave back to the office, how people Feel About the economy is the most important. Trump owns the economy with his absolute presidential power and a majority stake in Congress. increasinglyIt seems that tin can be tied to his cow.

In 2022, economic commentator Kyla Scanlon coined the term “Vibexport” which she later defined as “economic data tells us one story, consumer sentiment tells us another.” This concept quickly serves as an evocative shorthand for incredible phenomena in media coverage: through many traditional indicators, Biden’s economy is strongespecially in the second half of his term, when high inflation began to slow. However, many people are unmoved by the economy as a whole.

This obvious difference has different explanations. One popular argues that the media overemphasized negative data points (mostly inflation) and unrepresented anecdotes (e.g., a CNN field where about 11 families experience twelve gallons of milk per week) and failed to convey a larger picture. White House officials are among the people who are driving the idea, including Biden himself, who in increasing terms the press is not covering the economy in the “right way”. Others accused the government of not being enough to sell its economic achievements. (Biden later did not post his name on him Newly completed infrastructure projects Either way, the survey shows that even people who feel good about their financial situation or the economic situation in their state or region think that the national economy is moving in the wrong direction. Last year, in the spring, most respondents to a poll said the United States was in recession. Absolutely not.

Another school of thought believes that voters are not misleading about the economy and show that they are. According to this view, even after the rate of tail growth has dropped, Biden’s high inflation has left a psychological scar and a lasting price mark. Moreover, top-notch numbers reported by entities such as BLS failed to convey the struggles of low-income families, especially after plans in the early Biden era, such as enhanced child tax credits and suspension of evictions or no expansion. Even people who say in polls that their personal financial situation may have very legitimate reasons to look around and see an economic that seems to be distorted, broken, or even tied. In a country with a broken safety net, you don’t have to be a stubborn Biden skeptic.

Both of these views have aspects of truth. But what a reasonable bad atmosphere, Trump obviously benefits from it. Based on an oversimplified commitment, he won the election to a large extent, which not only ended inflation but also lowered prices. As I’m in Recent columnssurely much more than Biden and many other top Democrats. (For example, at the end of his first term in office, Trump Have done it Put his name on the irritant test. ) He managed to remain a forum for many who think the economy is stacked against people like them, if not necessarily against them personally, a broader anti-establishment call, for example, such as the firing of technologists from government statistical agencies, such as the firing of technologists. Last year, during the campaign, he also seemed to draw on the potential nostalgia of strong expectationsCoronavirus He oversees the economy. After he won the election, optimism about the economy soared, at least among his voters. Announced the atmosphere.

However, now that Trump is back in office, his economy needs performance to maintain a good atmosphere, and while its overall health is uncertain, he has done a lot to maximize this uncertainty, especially by whipping his tariff policy, which is Kyle Chayka Written in this magazinein April, turned the “recession indicator” into a widespread meme. It is widely believed that tariffs will drive consumer prices up, and there are early signs that this may be happening, as well as some warning signs in recent growth and employment data. No matter where we go from here, Trump is yelling at macroeconomic data, even if or true – it seems unlikely to change how most people feel. Ironically, even if Trump’s version urges the media to report data to the “right way”, he seems to be repeating Biden’s mistake, i.e.