Earlier this month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics job report was released, showing an anemic job market. President PoopyPants, unhappy with numbers deemed by nearly everyone to be accurate, of course pitched a fit and fired the head of BLS.
This won’t fix the problem, obviously, and now no one can trust any numbers anywhere, which breeds uncertainty which breeds caution which grinds the economy to a halt. Now I’m really wondering just how bad a cliff we’re now hurtling torwards which no one apparently in the driver’s seat. My hunch is it may be bad with a capital B.
For decades, statistics that came directly from the U.S. government, especially from agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), have long been the gold standard for measuring the health of the American economy. But this trust has been shaken by recent events, including substantial downward revisions to jobs data, bruising political accusations, and the unceremonious dismissal of Erika McEntarfer, the BLS’s top official, at the beginning of the month. The resulting uncertainty has left many Americans asking: If official government data can’t be trusted, how can you know if the economy is struggling?