The ‘Rigged’ Jobs Data
His side of the story: The president made headlines yesterday after announcing he would be firing the commissioner of labor statistics, who he alleges has been producing jobs reports that are “rigged” against his administration. This morning, he was asked about it: “The [Bureau of Labor Statistics] commissioner doesn’t even really get involved with the actual minutia of putting [jobs reports] together.…These are statistical changes based on this antiquated system, and it’s just a big leap to go to ‘rigged.’ And then it also, Mr. President, it makes anyone you pick…critics are gonna say, ‘Hey, he’s picking a guy or a gal who’s giving him the numbers he wants,’ so it undermines confidence in the system to some extent,” CNBC’s Joe Kernan posed to President Donald Trump on Squawk Box this morning.
“When they say that nobody was involved, that it wasn’t political, give me a break. Look, before the election, we had this massive, massive outflow of beauty for [Joe] Biden, I mean, we didn’t know he was alive….I mean [they claimed] the economy was roaring, it was a beautiful thing. And I said there’s no way this is happening; it’s going the opposite direction. And two weeks later, they said I was right,” responded Trump, referring to an unclear time period, who then just sort of kept meandering.
“Biden wasn’t doing well; he was doing poorly. They announced these phenomenal numbers two days before the election, and a little bit before that, always these great numbers….But think of it, then they did the biggest revision I think in history of almost 900,000 jobs….So they gave phony numbers in order to win the election. After I won the election I said, ‘Too big to rig!'”
Trump is probably referring to a reduction made in August 2024, so several months before the election, in which the BLS announced a preliminary estimate that the number of jobs created over the 12 months from March 2023 to March 2024 would be adjusted downward by 818,000—part of the annual “benchmarking” process. But the particulars really do matter, especially if his claim is that the timing of the BLS’ reports was done in a manner that it hoped would affect the outcome of the election.
Trump is really incorrect on the particulars and has struggled to marshal evidence to support his claim that the BLS has been systematically trying to hurt him when releasing jobs reports. But two things are possibly correct: That such massive errors that require such revisions indicate real, persistent issues with methodology that need to be corrected, and that Biden was given an awful lot of free passes by media and onlookers in the government as he ran the economy into the ground, with revisions being covered a lot less than the initial headlines.
Trump in high heels: Just what we needed. Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) has decided to run for governor of South Carolina. Once a more moderate Republican, she’s now gone full sycophant, saying she’ll be a “super MAGA governor.”
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