This Jobs Report Is the Trump Presidency in a Nutshell

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This month, after another disappointing Jobs Report, President Donald Trump is once again looking around for someone to blame. There is no pandemic, despite RFK’s best efforts; no external supply shocks that Trump himself didn’t cause through his tariff regime. Donald Trump has spiked the baton he was handed by the Biden administration, and he has no one to blame but himself.

This time around, he’s going after the entire Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS, an agency that collects economic data about our country and workforce, poses a danger to Trump because it counters his lies with data. It is made up of career public servants, the very people Trump has been vilifying since day one. The Trump administration has already tried to strangle the agency by slashing its workforce by 20 percent, and after the disgraceful firing of the Commissioner last month, the career staff who make up the rest of the BLS knew that an honest August Jobs Report would incur the wrath of the Trump administration. But they did their jobs anyway. Unlike everyone in Trump World, BLS employees are unwilling to protect their own jobs above all else.

BLS’s work is complex and requires tremendous expertise, and Trump ridicules and seeks to discredit anything complex. But he does so at all of our peril: billions of dollars of public and private investment rely on these numbers. The Federal Reserve uses them to set interest rates. They give policymakers a guide to what’s working and who it’s working for. They signal whether a recession is coming so it can be mitigated or avoided through smart, thoughtful decision-making by those in power. Without data to inform those decisions, we’re just supposed to trust the president who has shown time and time again that truth is an inconvenient barrier to his self-serving version of reality.

When it comes to collection of real-time economic data, speed and completeness are often a trade-off, but even with limited resources, BLS has been the gold standard of economic data collection across the globe. They work to release numbers quickly through monthly jobs reports so lawmakers and businesses can make adjustments in real time, but they also release additional data when they get it to give the fullest picture possible. That way, decision-makers can make investments, states and local governments can plan their budgets, and policymakers can evaluate their actions with the most confidence that they’re making the best short- and long-term decisions. These revisions are not signs of error but evidence of transparency.

https://www.meidasplus.com/p/this-jobs-report-is-the-trump-presidency