Firing the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner won’t improve the U.S. economy.
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.