From the Hill oped, Sen. Mullin opines:
For too long, America has been flying blind on our economic health. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is in desperate need of immediate reform and President Trump is putting the best team in place to do just that. EJ Antoni, Ph.D., will restore confidence and much needed integrity in the agency tasked with reporting on the state of our nation’s economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is most well-known for producing the monthly jobs report, must be the gold standard for labor data and a trusted source for Americans and partners worldwide.
One major problem is that BLS jobs and economic reports are frequently revised. …
So frequent revisions are a problem. Well, we could be just like China, and report a GDP number *real* fast. And we could stick with the first releases – no changes ever! And we could also remove from prying eyes the source data, like China does. Better yet, let anybody who questions the data be prosecuted for economic spying.
I for one an looking forward to undoing revisions to GDP, so that we go back to expressing it in constant 1987$.
no revisions eh. This guy obviously understands sample surveys ( sarc)
test
Mullin’s bio is on sherdog.com. That’s an MMA website. So I presume he took too many blows to the head, which would explain this rant.
Mullin is the only current member of the U.S. Senate without at least a bachelor’s degree. He makes a big deal about his career in mixed martial arts, perhaps to distract from his limited education, but in fact only had 5 fights, none against ranked fighters. He has, however, threatened to beat up a witness at a Senate hearing when the witness corrected a misstatement of fact by Mullin.
When it comes to Mullin’s assertions of “credibility”, let’s remember that in the case of accusations of sexual misconduct against Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, Mullin took the view that the men had credibility, their victims did not. Also, let’s not forget that Mullin skated through an Ethics Committee investigation of his business practices by claiming accounting errors, all of which worked in his favor.
Oh, and Mullin’s only Committee association with the Department of Labor is Appropriations.
Mullin is a least-common-denominator kind of Senator.
By the way, with the end of the current fiscal year just around the corner, looks like a deal for a 1-year continuing resolution is just about in hand. Dems, some of whose votes are needed in the Senate, have held out for extending Obamacare tax credits as the price of their support. Republicans, for their part, seem intent on limiting the extention of the tax credit to one year:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/a-possible-govt-funding-deal-comes-into-view-as-trumps-lawlessness-looms
Why might a health insurance tax credit be a good idea for the next twelve months, but not beyond? Well, that same question could be asked about many of the harms done to the less well off in the Big Bloated Budget Bill; the implementation of those various harms was also delayed for a year. The answer, of course, is that Republicans don’t want voters to feel the effect of Republican budget policies until after the mid-term elections.
Swing voters mostly don’t know much about politics or policy. Until they actually feel the harm done to them by Republican policies, they don’t know that the harm is coming – reason enough to delay a while.
The folks at TPM (see link) are miffed because Democrats have asked for so little in return for their support for a budget that almost entirely ignores Democrat’s priorities. Republicans have only slight majorities in Congress, and their budget priorities don’t reflect their own voters’ wished, so there’s reason to be miffed at Democrats’ easy virtue.
“The answer, of course, is that Republicans don’t want voters to feel the effect of Republican budget policies until after the mid-term elections.”
which is exactly why trump has been so insistent upon rate cuts in the face of the most incredible economy the world has ever seen. on one hand, trump wants to tout the strength of his policy for the economy, while claiming any negative numbers are the result of some massive conspiracy against him in the statistics agency. but a strong economy does not need a rate cut. so why is he so insistent on rate cuts, if the economy is performing so swimmingly under his watch? rate cuts are the only thing that save him on the economic front for the mid terms. his economic and tariff policy are slowly introducing stagflation, or worse, recession. the disaster after the midterm is not a worry for him, since he is not running for reelection. the goal is getting through the midterms and maintaining power in the legislature over that time period.