Firing BLS Commissioner
The firing of the BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer for delivering bad news.
This is all over the news so I can not claim new, news at Angry Bear. Of course, as you already know, July’s BLS Jobs Report came in at 75,000. The two earlier months were revised downward to 14,000 for June and 19,000 for May. Some rather dramatic cuts for May and June. Some history on delivering bad news.
“Don’t shoot the messenger” was first expressed (very obliquely) by Shakespeare in Henry IV, part 2 (1598). In Antony and Cleopatra: When told Antony has married another, Cleopatra threatens to treat the messenger’s eyes as balls. Eliciting the response ‘gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match’.
Prior to that, a related sentiment was expressed in Antigone by Sophocles as “No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.”
So just hours ago (August 1) Trump fired the head of the BLS Erika McEntarfer, claiming the August 1 BLS numbers and prior months numbers were rigged.
“Trump destroys our source of information about jobs. This is beyond irresponsible)”
Robert Reich:
I spent much of the 1990s as Secretary of Labor. One unit of the Labor Department is the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I was instructed by my predecessors as well as by the White House, and by every labor economist and statistician I came in contact with, that one of my cardinal responsibilities was to guard the independence of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Otherwise, this crown jewel of knowledge about jobs and the economy would be compromised. If politicized, it would no longer be trusted as a source of information.
So what does Trump do? With one fell swoop today he destroyed the BLS.
Trump didn’t like the fact that the BLS revised downward its jobs reports for April and May. Revisions in monthly jobs report are nothing new. They’re made when the Bureau gets more or better information over time.
Yet with no basis in fact, Trump charged that Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” Then he ordered her fired and replaced with someone else — presumably someone whose data Trump will approve of.
How can anyone in the future trust the data that emerges from the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the person in charge of the agency has to come up with data to Trump’s liking in order to stay in the job? Answer: They cannot. Trump has destroyed the credibility of this extraordinarily important source of information.
When Trump doesn’t like the message he shoots the messenger, and replaces the messenger with someone who will come up with messages he approves of.
So, we’re left without credible sources of information about what is really occurring.
Trump is in the process of trying to do the same thing with the Federal Reserve — demanding that Jerome Powell, the Fed’s chair, cut interest rates. Trump is even threatening Powell with a Trumped-up expose of Powell’s supposed extravagance in refurbishing the Fed as a means of forcing Powell to do his bidding or resign.
What happens to the Fed’s credibility if Powell give in to Trump? It loses it. In the future, we wouldn’t have confidence that the Fed is fighting inflation, as it should. And without that confidence, longer-term interest rates will spike because investors will assume that there’s no inflation cop on the beat, and therefore will demand a higher risk premium.
Trump hates facts that he disagrees with. That’s why he’s dismembering the Environmental Protection Agency, which has repeatedly shown that climate change isn’t a “hoax,” as Trump claims, but more like a national emergency. It’s why Trump is attacking American universities, whose scientists are developing wind and solar energy, and whose historians have revealed America’s tragic history of racism and genocide of indigenous people. He is killing off the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, which are showing the sources of sickness and disease and how we can guard against them.
This is a man and a regime that doesn’t want the public to know the truth. He is turning America into George Orwell’s dystopian 1984.
This is what fascism looks like, friends.
We must fight this with everything we have.
This is bog ordinary totalitarian behavior. The point isn’t the lies. The point is to exhaust peoples’ critical thinking and destroy the credibility of any authority outside of the dictator’s word. It’s the Nazi program. It’s the Bolshevik program. Neither of those ended well.
We tell you what is real and what is not. It is a standard practice by Tr__p. He is the only correct one in the room. I get it. Thanks for the input.
Joel, neither of those ended well, but the damage was horrendous. Trump won’t end well either, no matter how much of his “program” he completes. And the damage is already mounting up. I can only hope that this country recovers as well as Germany did after the Nazis. And not just economically.
Looking on the brighter side, the BLS jobs report, the Consumer Price Index, and the GDP are hideously antiquated and inadequate measures of anything else but whatever it is they measure. Of course, this is not why Trump fired the BLS Commissioner and doesn’t justify his action. Whatever he comes up with will be worse. Job numbers by “Ron Vara,” anyone?
Aggregates lose their reliability when the things being aggregated are hugely dissimilar. This is no doubt the reason the BLS measures NONFARM employment of the CIVILIAN population. Do the Current Employment Statistics exclude BULLSHIT JOBS? Of course not. We don’t know how many lickspittles, toad swallowers, and boot lickers were employed in July, compared with June.
This may seem like semantic quibbling when ranged against an autocrat’s demand for numbers that make him look good. Maybe it is. Much of my experience with BLS statistics has been related to hours of labor and productivity. I have found them to be undecipherably aggregated. It’s not just me. Back in the 1960s, Edward Dennison, one of the pioneers of national income accounting lamented the dismal condition of data collection on hours of labor and recommended much greater attention to that factor. It didn’t get better.
Marc Linder wrote about how the Bureau’s Unit Labor Cost was “bourgeoisified” by relating current (inflated) wages to “real” (deflated) physical unit output. This is like putting a thumb on labor’s scale during contract negotiations. Obviously this is not something commissioner “Ron Vara” will be concerned with.