We are crossing yet another milestone in the march to ever more Orwellian territory, wherein the American people will no longer have a reliably neutral arbiter of economic numbers. Today, the Bureau of Labor Statistics put out a jobs report in which it noted that the country added just 73,000 jobs – a very disappointing number compared to the 125,000 expected (Which means that a report with 200,000 new jobs wouldn’t be otherworldly), and the number immediately sent the stock market down. The fact that these offices, the BLS, or the Congressional Budget Office, et. al., are non-political and do the same job no matter who is president means less than nothing to Donald Trump, who says he will fire the head of the office. There will be consequences when he does.
Holy shit this is real Soviet/N. Korean style stuff. After the dismal jobs report Trump is going to fire people who compile the data and replace them with hacks. The markets and American people will never be able to trust these numbers again.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-08-01T18:21:54.628Z
As everyone knows, the economy is the economy, and the promise to create good-sounding news instead of the real news is more dangerous than a bad jobs number. Not only do the markets rely on reliable numbers from the government to set stock prices, but, perhaps more importantly, the Federal Reserve and the banks need this information to set interest rates, which then flow back to impact everything from your mortgage, stock prices (again), bonds, even the grocery prices at Walmart. An economy is dynamic, with non-linear movement, everything feeding back on everything else.
If the official office becomes nothing more than a political pawn, big money will no longer be able to rely on those published numbers and will have to work to put their own together. Unlike the government, that information will be kept secret (e.g. Chase Visa does a study of leading indicators; when it pays for such a study, it will not share the results with competitors, putting a massive price on simply the cost of doing business). Indeed, everything else, whether it is unemployment numbers, average salaries, prices, to the GDP, all of it will suddenly be yet another number, no more reliable than a Donald Trump tweet.
This truly is North Korea, Soviet-style government, one with no footing in the real world but having to do business with and compete against other countries. This is not what made America great; this is a nosedive to the bottom. Equally unfortunate, if the government process and infrastructure needed to get real numbers is torn down in the name of political opportunism, it will not be easy to set it back up by another administration.
Americans are used to believing that anything radical done by one administration can, eventually, be reversed by a decent next one (Read: “Democratic administration” – the adults). But all of this requires experts and processes that are actually not easily put back together. Everything from the CDC, the NIH, even NASA, or the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is at risk now of having to spend a decade to build back up.
It is all about Trump and his fortunes, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it. He doesn’t care that he’s ruining the very thing he attempts to “rule.” Rather than actually trying to make things better, he’s covering up reality, all in a desperate attempt to save himself. The master of lies and shortcuts would rather just publish good numbers than create real ones. I continually write that if the economy were to really enter a tailspin, he would be exceedingly vulnerable. Trump seems to sense this all too well. So he decides to make it worse beforehand, as if he can paper over something as complex as the American economy.
Childish but extremely dangerous. Now watch the markets react to him firing this commissioner of labor statistics.
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Besides this months job numbers being down, I heard on the radio that the numbers for May and June were incorrect. I didn’t catch the reason, but the numbers for those months were over inflated. By the time this administration is over, I don’t know if our country will be salvageable.
new information comes in late because the businesses that report are behind and don’t always get in the numbers and details in on time. happens fairly often but usually not enough to make a big difference like now👍
I’m curious what the farm payroll is now since a lot of the workers r gone.