DATA CREDIBILITY NOW IN QUESTION
“Politicising economic statistics is a self-defeating act,” said Michael Madowitz, principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute’s Roosevelt Forward.
“Credibility is far easier to lose than rebuild, and the credibility of America’s economic data is the foundation on which we’ve built the strongest economy in the world. Blinding the public about the state of the economy has a long track record, and it never ends well.”
Earlier this year, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick disbanded two expert committees that worked with the government to produce economic statistics.
Lutnick has also floated the idea of stripping out government spending from the gross domestic product report, claiming “governments historically have messed with GDP”.
The BLS has already reduced the sample collection for consumer price data as well as the producer price report, citing resource constraints. The government surveys about 121,000 businesses and government agencies, representing approximately 631,000 individual worksites for the employment report.
The response rate has declined from 80.3 per cent in October 2020 to about 67.1 per cent in July.
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” Trump wrote in another Truth Social post, without offering any evidence.
Economists attributed the near-stall in job growth to Trump’s trade and immigration policies. They said uncertainty about where Trump’s tariff level would settle had made it difficult for businesses to plan long-term.
More clarity has emerged as the White House has announced trade deals, but economists said the effective tariff rate was still the highest since the 1930s.
Trump slapped dozens of trading partners with steep tariffs on Thursday, including a 35 per cent duty on many goods from Canada.
