Trump should heed, not hide, the jobs numbers

Washington Post

2 days ago

Here's a life hack for readers who are trying to lose weight and are discouraged by the numbers on the scale: Take a hammer to the thing. If that seems too destructive, donate it to the Salvation Army and, if you must keep a scale in the house, buy a new model that tops out at 150 pounds.
The secret behind this hack is psychology. It's hard to eat less than your body wants, which is why people who try to lose weight often fail and feel miserable. But if no working scale is available, you can't fail: Eat as much as you like; the numbers will never climb.
Sound crazy? It is. But the president has just used a version of this trick to deal with a sagging American jobs market.
For months, commentators have been asking why tariffs aren't weighing on the economy more heavily. Importers — including many manufacturers — have been worried that they will. But the headline jobs and gross domestic product data have looked pretty good. Then came Friday's jobs report.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the Labor Department, revised its estimates for May and June payrolls sharply downward, by more than 250,000 jobs, and estimated that the economy added only 73,000 jobs in July, well below analysts' expectations. Virtually all these new jobs came from health care and social services. The numbers contain no sign of the manufacturing boom that President Donald Trump has promised.
This is not the sort of jobs report any president wants to see; it's the kind that portends falling approval ratings and party losses at the next election. So Trump took immediate, decisive action: He hopped on Truth Social and announced that he would fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
This move was so boneheaded, William Beach, who served as bureau commissioner during the first Trump administration, called it 'totally groundless' and 'a dangerous precedent' that 'undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.'
A hearty second to that. Trying to intimidate the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the policy equivalent of smashing your bathroom scale. It's banana republic stuff, and it won't work any better in the United States.
On the margin, a few voters might be fooled into thinking economic conditions are better than they really are. But the trick can work only so far — as the Biden administration found out when it tried to gaslight voters into believing that everything in the White House was going just great. The people most susceptible to the spin fall into two groups: the president's base, who don't need it, and high-information voters who pay close attention to economic data, many of whom will understand how the numbers have been juked, and most of whom probably already know which side they're voting for next time around.
Everyone will be paying closer attention to what's happening in their own experience. Are wages rising? Are their friends and relatives being laid off? Is it easy to find another job? If they're getting the wrong answers to these questions, it really doesn't matter what numbers the bureau is putting out.
That is, it doesn't matter politically. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers matter tremendously in other ways. They feed into a great deal of market activity as well as vital social science, both of which are possible only if the numbers are trustworthy. The statistics are also, of course, one of the president's essential guides to economic policy.
This guide is now telling the administration that it is moving in the wrong direction. A wise politician would take heed and course-correct to avoid bumbling deeper into the woods. Instead, Trump wants to shoot the messenger so his supporters won't realize he's led them astray.
He might be able to find a new BLS commissioner who will cook the numbers to make them more aesthetically pleasing, though this would not be easy. As economist Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out, a lot of people work on these numbers, 'So absent mass firings at BLS, this solves nothing.'
But even if Trump managed to bully the guides into telling him what he wants to hear, what then? Eventually voters will look around and notice the truth: America is losing its way.