President Donald Trump’s decision too Fire Dr. Erika MecentarferThe commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last Friday, after a dark job report is not only criticized by its usual opponents, but also by his allies.
Stephen Moore, former economic advisor of President Donald Trump, told Assets This shot of Mcentarfer, when he did it, was not liked to “fired the referee because it did not like the way the game has become”.
“I’m not here to defend Trump,” added Moore, who also acted Trump’s unique candidate as governor of the Federal Reserve. “But I think he should have released it a long time ago because the numbers that have come out in recent years were simply not precise of what was really going on in the economy.”
Trump was refreshed by Mcenstarfer after the new report had significantly revised the US jobs from May and June and combined around 258,000 jobs for these months. The revision forms the greatest Downward revision of jobs in almost 60 years.
The President wrote In a social post on Friday in truth that McEctarfer, a bidding administration, “manipulated” and “fake”, which report the jobs for political profits. He said he would replace them with someone who “more competent”.
Transition of survey data away
Although Moore did not agree that the numbers were manipulated, Trump agreed that the BLS needed a new “Mr. Fix IT” to head the office. He said that in his 40 years of working in economic research, he had never seen that the jobs have become so unreliable.
The latest economic data are plagued by the same topic as political survey data: Nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore, said Moore. The monthly job report is strongly based on surveys of companies and households that work when all landline helins are used, but is less reliable in the digital age.
“The procedures that the BLS uses are 75 years old,” added Moore. “They have to be completely revised.”
The pandemic seems to have accelerated the trend of people who ignore the calls from bollards. Before 2020, Response rates Around 60%have helped to help the current employment statistics surveys that the BLS put together the monthly job report. Since then it has dropped to 45%.
Days before Trump fired Mcenfarter, a cross -party group of economists – including the Nobel Prize winner Paul Romer – a letter the congress to ask for funds to modernize the data acquisition process.
Agencies need space and money to restore the provisions of the surveys and at the same time experiment with new data for data collection, argued the economists.
“The transition to a system in which fewer survey data is mixed with administrative and private secture data, while data integrity and data protection standards are retained, is the generally important task with which statistical agencies are confronted today,” wrote the economists.
Researchers of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, which, however, studied The responsiveness of surveys at the beginning of this year showed that the falling response rates have concerns about the reliability of data, but did not necessarily lead to above -average revisions in reports such as the monthly job report.
Claire Mersol, economist at BLS, told The Wall Street Journal This was a large part of the revisions of the previous figures to part of the “routine recalculation of the seasonal factors”.
“As a rule, the monthly revisions have balanced the movements within the industries – one increases, one goes under,” said Mersol. “Most revisions were negative in June.”
In other words, the sharply negative revisions could have been random.
Even if the data have become more unreliable, some Republican allies of the President said that firing the head of the BLS would hardly help to fix the problem. Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, told NBC News That he asked how the move would improve the accuracy of BLS.
“I will examine it, but the first impression is that you can’t really make the numbers differently or better by firing the people who make the count,” he said.
GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska said she didn’t trust the numbers, but the move makes it worse.
“And if they fire people, it lets people trust them even less,” she said.
