Trump Wants to Fire Commissioner of Labor Statistics

Bloomberg

4 days ago

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00:00Mike, who is this individual? Well, it is a doctor. Erica McIntyre for who is the commissioner of labor statistics. Basically, she was nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate in January of 2024. She's only been on the job for a little over a year. But this is kind of outrageous accusation by the by the president. The BLS is not fudging the numbers. I guarantee you they are not fudging the numbers. And, Mike, it reminds me of something that we heard before the election from then Senator Marco Rubio who was questioning strong jobs numbers during the Biden administration and essentially coming out and saying, do we trust these numbers and trying to cast them in a doubtful light when they were the other way? Well, what this shows, I think, at base, leaving aside Trump's desire for revenge on everything, is that there is an awful lot of other an awful lot of people who are who do not understand statistics and do not understand how to look at probabilities. The government in the in the report on jobs, the government notes that there is a margin of error of a little over 100,000 jobs per month. So we got 73,000. It could have been 173,000 or it could have been -17,000 and those would have been statistically valid results. You can't have a perfect number each time. We don't count every single person. Plus, it depends on how many companies send back their results at the right time. And that is something that is a problem that we have seen more and more that the government isn't getting the responses that they need. And then there's the statistical adjustment problem we talked about where you're trying to account for changes in the labor force month to month. And that's been true under President Trump, under President Biden, under President Obama, the statistical variation that it could have been 100 more or 100 less. That hasn't changed. It's been true since 1923 when they started doing these surveys. Mike, we rely on this data, whether it's one that does, to be quite honest, right, that our data is investors rely on it, traders rely on it, macroeconomics, professors rely on this. I mean, economists rely on this stuff. Over the last few years when we've been talking about data from China, for example, sometimes we ask the question, can we trust the data coming out of a certain country? Is that an issue in the United States if we if this type of thing becomes politicized? Oh, it's definitely an issue. The United States is the gold standard of of economic statistics, and it has been eroded The ability to produce the best statistics because there's no constituency on Capitol Hill like is pounding on congressmen's doors saying give more money to statistics. So every time they need to cut a little something here or there in the budget because they're spending on something else, they say we'll take it out of the BLS or the BCA or the Census Bureau and and they won't notice. But they do. We end up with a degraded ability to get an accurate number, but that doesn't mean they're not statistically valid within the parameters of of the margins of error which are published. And all of the the all of the methodology for all of the statistics is published by all of these agencies in the rest of the world would love to have the statistics that we have. Is it unfair for me to ask that when the numbers came out in the prior month of 147,000, we pointed out they've been revised down significantly. But when they first came out that the president didn't come out and question that number at that time. Absolutely. Is it fair to ask that? Yeah, it's fair to ask that. We've we've had this happen before where you do get even larger revisions as the numbers come in and and they work. And Tim, you were talking about last year, what what the government does is they survey establishments around the country for how many people are on their payrolls. And as I said, there's some they don't always get all of them back, etc.. And they they try to make it as accurate as possible. But then what they do is once a year they do it every quarter, but they do a cross-check against people's tax records. So these. To see how many people were on payrolls by what was withheld. And those numbers showed last year a significant over count in jobs. And this year, they're expecting the same thing that they have over counted. And then they just they go back and they change the numbers and and make them agree with the more accurate tax numbers. But that's just a normal statistical adjustment that's made. And, you know, we do that with GDP. You get you get an adjustment after five years because they look at the tax records and they see what's what was actually happening.