Trump fires commissioner of labor statistics to be fired after weak jobs figures

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have already passed the point of no return. It will be sometime after my life that the US may have a reliable government and government data again, but it won't be while I am still walking this earth.

Sad.

Agree. But there is hope. Germany recovered fairly quickly from Hitler who was in absolute power from 1933 to 1945. That's 12 years. Trump has only had "absolute power" since Jan. 20, 2025. He is out of office in Jan. '29 and there are a few GOP members of the House and Senate are finally showing some guts!
The Epstein scandal is not going away and is his doom.

Germany wasn’t a country again until 1990!

[Anonymous]

Trump is full of it and has White House spinmeisters on overdrive trying to bamboozle Americans.

There is no evidence that BLS intentionally manipulated data for political purposes. Former BLS commissioners and economists have stated that the commissioner cannot alter data and that the system is designed to prevent tampering.

Trump claimed the 818,000-job revision happened after the 2024 election, in order to make Democrats look good. In fact, it was released on August 21, 2024, before the Democratic convention and months before the election. Logic and timing fail.

And ultimately he grossly distorts the impact of the revisions. While revisions were large, they affected monthly changes, not the total job count. The labor market remains vast, so a 258,000 revision, while significant, is a small fraction of total employment.

[Anonymous]

The MAGA apologists are now backing Trump’s decision. There can be no data unless it’s data that Trump likes. We are now in a Banana republic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/us/politics/trump-republicans-bls-jobs-analysis.html

Republicans Suddenly Distrust Jobs Data After Trump Fires Statistics Chief
President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics forced his allies into the awkward spot of criticizing an agency they had freely cited in the past.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The MAGA apologists are now backing Trump’s decision. There can be no data unless it’s data that Trump likes. We are now in a Banana republic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/us/politics/trump-republicans-bls-jobs-analysis.html

Republicans Suddenly Distrust Jobs Data After Trump Fires Statistics Chief
President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics forced his allies into the awkward spot of criticizing an agency they had freely cited in the past.

I've seen countries where no one trusts the data, and it's not pretty. Investors don't come in, because the political environment is too volatile and it's too risky to invest in something when you can't monitor basic facts about the economy. It's sad that Trump is destroying the best of American research capabilities that used to be a model for other countries.

[Anonymous]

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman "the paranoid style in American economics." Trump is killing the credibility of American institutions.

Most economists found this report entirely credible. The BLS has a sterling reputation for careful, objective analysis, and as I said, Friday’s report brought the official estimates into line with other evidence. What about those revisions? As Jared Berstein explained in a Substack post yesterday, revisions are normal. Without getting too deep into the weeds, the BLS wants to be timely, so it issues preliminary reports based on incomplete data, then routinely revises them as more data come in. Revisions tend to be especially large around turning points; what we saw Friday is exactly what we’d expect if the economy is in fact experiencing a significant slowdown, which would show up more strongly in revised data than in the initial reports.

But Donald Trump screamed “conspiracy” and fired the head of the BLS, because of course he did:

I don’t want to spend much time debunking Trump’s claim that there was a conspiracy to make the job numbers look bad. Suffice it to say that rigging the job numbers would be a complicated process, requiring the cooperation of many people, and we’d almost surely have whistleblowers telling us that it was happening. In fact, we will know that it’s happening when, as seems highly likely, Trump’s people politicize the BLS.

And as I said, independent indicators also point to a job slowdown. For example, Automatic Data Processing, which does many companies’ payrolls, produces independent estimates of private employment. People I know who follow these things closely consider ADP’s numbers noisy and less reliable than BLS, but if BLS were rigging the numbers to hide the glories of the Trump economy, we’d expect to see that hidden Trump boom in the ADP estimates. We don’t.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hopefully Trump will just shut down Bureau of Labor Statistics. The White House press secretary could announce whatever number Trump wants and save 644 million a year.

Shut down a main provider of PFEI?! Lol. Silly comment from a know-nothing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hopefully Trump will just shut down Bureau of Labor Statistics. The White House press secretary could announce whatever number Trump wants and save 644 million a year.

Shut down a main provider of PFEI?! Lol. Silly comment from a know-nothing.

He won't shut it down probably. He could easily put an incompentent, amoral ideologue in charge and kill its usefulness and reputation (see: Hegseth, RFK Jr.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hopefully Trump will just shut down Bureau of Labor Statistics. The White House press secretary could announce whatever number Trump wants and save 644 million a year.

Shut down a main provider of PFEI?! Lol. Silly comment from a know-nothing.

He won't shut it down probably. He could easily put an incompentent, amoral ideologue in charge and kill its usefulness and reputation (see: Hegseth, RFK Jr.)

Uh, depends on what mean by useful, it certainly doesn't have much of a reputation in my book.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hopefully Trump will just shut down Bureau of Labor Statistics. The White House press secretary could announce whatever number Trump wants and save 644 million a year.

Shut down a main provider of PFEI?! Lol. Silly comment from a know-nothing.

He won't shut it down probably. He could easily put an incompentent, amoral ideologue in charge and kill its usefulness and reputation (see: Hegseth, RFK Jr.)

Uh, depends on what mean by useful, it certainly doesn't have much of a reputation in my book.

It’s because you’re a moron.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hopefully Trump will just shut down Bureau of Labor Statistics. The White House press secretary could announce whatever number Trump wants and save 644 million a year.

Shut down a main provider of PFEI?! Lol. Silly comment from a know-nothing.

+1
This is basically the same thing Trump said at the height of the pandemic.

"Without testing we would be showing almost no cases."

"If they didn't have the revision, then the jobs numbers were fully consistent with the 3% GDP."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The MAGA apologists are now backing Trump’s decision. There can be no data unless it’s data that Trump likes. We are now in a Banana republic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/us/politics/trump-republicans-bls-jobs-analysis.html

Republicans Suddenly Distrust Jobs Data After Trump Fires Statistics Chief
President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics forced his allies into the awkward spot of criticizing an agency they had freely cited in the past.

I've seen countries where no one trusts the data, and it's not pretty. Investors don't come in, because the political environment is too volatile and it's too risky to invest in something when you can't monitor basic facts about the economy. It's sad that Trump is destroying the best of American research capabilities that used to be a model for other countries.

Yes, low-trust countries are ugly. Unfortunately, Democrats favor policies that are guaranteed to make the US a low-trust country.

If Dems wanted truthful leaders, they should have policies Slick Willy when he perjured himself. Better yet, they should have stopped Archibald Cox from thwarting due process to get a preferred result. But these people favored FDR's court-packing scheme, so we can't expect them to value process over results. They've been this way for a long time. The funny (and sad!) part is their process began when they opened the borders for low-trust people many decades ago. Only stopping that invasion allowed the US to heal.

[Anonymous]

She was a commie leftist

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hopefully Trump will just shut down Bureau of Labor Statistics. The White House press secretary could announce whatever number Trump wants and save 644 million a year.

Shut down a main provider of PFEI?! Lol. Silly comment from a know-nothing.

He won't shut it down probably. He could easily put an incompentent, amoral ideologue in charge and kill its usefulness and reputation (see: Hegseth, RFK Jr.)

Uh, depends on what mean by useful, it certainly doesn't have much of a reputation in my book.

It’s because you’re a moron.

+1 There's no other labor statistics comparable to the quality and breadth that BLS produces. Someone posted Krugman's assessment of potential data weaknesses upthread. I take his opinion as a Nobel prize winner over yours as a MAGA ignoramous.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The MAGA apologists are now backing Trump’s decision. There can be no data unless it’s data that Trump likes. We are now in a Banana republic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/us/politics/trump-republicans-bls-jobs-analysis.html

Republicans Suddenly Distrust Jobs Data After Trump Fires Statistics Chief
President Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics forced his allies into the awkward spot of criticizing an agency they had freely cited in the past.

I've seen countries where no one trusts the data, and it's not pretty. Investors don't come in, because the political environment is too volatile and it's too risky to invest in something when you can't monitor basic facts about the economy. It's sad that Trump is destroying the best of American research capabilities that used to be a model for other countries.

Yes, low-trust countries are ugly. Unfortunately, Democrats favor policies that are guaranteed to make the US a low-trust country.

If Dems wanted truthful leaders, they should have policies Slick Willy when he perjured himself. Better yet, they should have stopped Archibald Cox from thwarting due process to get a preferred result. But these people favored FDR's court-packing scheme, so we can't expect them to value process over results. They've been this way for a long time. The funny (and sad!) part is their process began when they opened the borders for low-trust people many decades ago. Only stopping that invasion allowed the US to heal.

You seem like you prefer living in your version of what you perceived 50 years ago, than face the facts that Trump is far destructive to American credibility than any President we've ever had. I guess I would too if I were a Trump supporter. He's nearly impossible to defend.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:She was a commie leftist

She was/is not in the slightest. I know her.