From the NYT:
Two days after President Trump fired the top labor official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, insisted on Sunday that the administration was “absolutely not” shooting the messenger on the heels of a poor jobs report.
But Mr. Hassett repeatedly declined to furnish detailed evidence that would substantiate the president’s claims that the data had been rigged or manipulated to hurt him politically.
…
on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Hassett claimed there were “partisan patterns” in the jobless data, and said that “data can’t be propaganda.”
It is important to recall that Dr. Hassett both authored Dow 36,000 in 1999, and applied a quadratic specification to predict covid fatalities.
Note that Hassett isn’t just talking about the commissioner. He also said that Trump “wants his own people there.” This is worse because the commissioner doesn’t actually compile the numbers. It’s the staff that do that and those are the people Trump wants to replace.
This is reminiscent of Nixon’s Jew List, when he claimed that people in the BLS were undermining him with bad numbers, just like Trump. This also occurred at an economic turning point into stagflation.
It’s important to note that the BLS also computes the CPI and Trump’s big campaign promise was that he will reduce inflation. He needs to do something to counter his inflationary tariffs.
CPI is at the legal foundation of major parts of the economy, including the Social Security COLA, I-bonds, TIPS, nominal treasury and corporate bond rates, Medicare Part B premiums and surcharges, tax brackets and phase out limits throughout the tax code, and many private contracts. Loss of trust in the CPI numbers will have a major impact on the economy, adding an extra layer of inflation risk — not just the risk of inflation, but the risk of misreported inflation.
inflation will occur whether trump tries to hide it with propaganda or not. people will know when they are losing purchasing power. the cpi and bls are not needed. and trump has almost 3.5 years remaining in his term. you can hide this stuff for a year or so. his mistakes will be open sores by the time his term is up. covid actually took attention away from his poor performance the last time. unless we have another pandemic or world war, eventually he will be exposed as the fraud he is.