You have been missing out on a lot if you haven’t been following the story at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a modest federal organization.
For your information, Erika McEntarfer, who had been nominated by former President Joe Biden to lead the organization that, among other things, determines and publishes the monthly jobs report figures, was recently sacked by President Trump.
Since statistics are numbers and it’s crucial that they are impartial and accurate, the office has long been independent and nonpolitical.
Trump, however, took issue with the July jobs data, which revealed that the U.S. economy had created fewer jobs than analysts had predicted. Thus, he unjustly accused her of correcting them.
He posted a lengthy article on Truth Social saying, “I think that today’s jobs numbers were rigged to make the Republicans and me look bad.”
He praised the jobs report she published just a month ago. AMAZING JOBS, BUY A LOT OF STOCK!
However, she was gone, and wild conjecture on the BLS’s future started.
It was reasonable for analysts and economists to be concerned that Trump would appoint a partisan lackey to boost future employment figures. To put it another way, to do just what he said McEntarfer was doing—that is, to rig them.
Accurate data is essential, they cautioned, as investors use it to weight portfolios and federal policymakers use it to set interest rates, calculate annual cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security pensioners, and modify tax brackets. Employers, students, and headhunters use the data to determine which occupations require larger workforces and which are decreasing.
Thus, you can see how falsifying the records to show a better state of the economy than the one that actually exists could have some extremely negative effects.
It seems that Trump enjoys the way that sounds.
E.J. Antoni, the head economist at the right-wing Hermann Center for the Federal Budget of the Heritage Foundation, comes in.
When Trump named Antoni as his choice to succeed McEntarfer earlier this week, the investigation into Antoni’s past got underway. You won’t be surprised to hear that he is the ideal MAGA applicant for the position.
He is a political hack, to start. A regular on Steve Bannon’s War Room program, he has previously joined Bannon in attacking the BLS, including the week those July figures were released.
Have we added a personal member to BLS? Bannon asked Antoni. Is the Bureau of Labor Statistics currently controlled by a MAGA Republican that President Trump knows and trusts? The questions alone demonstrated a brazen desire to undermine the organization.
And Antoni’s response made it clear that he completely agreed. No, Steve, we still haven’t reached that point. He continued by accusing McEntarfer of being incompetent. She was fired by Trump later that day.
Speaking of ineptitude, Antoni is completely unqualified. That’s what other conservative economists who know and collaborate with him say.
Stan Veuger, a senior scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, told Axios that Antoni’s work at Heritage has often had simple mistakes or illogical decisions that all skew his conclusions in the same biased manner.
He has either demonstrated a total ignorance of economic facts and principles or a determination to treat his audience with disdain and mislead them, according to Kyle Pomerleau, another AEI economist, who spoke to the New York Times.
“The articles and tweets I’ve seen him publish are probably the most error-filled of any think tank economist right now,” wrote Jessica Riedl, a senior scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute. At BLS, I hope we see better.
Additionally, Antoni has alluded to delaying the jobs report until he is certain that the figures are correct. That is to say, Trump-approved.
Additionally, Antoni has the ideal history to go along with his ideal credentials. literally.
Antoni frequently makes an appearance on TV shows or podcasts from his office, where he sits in front of a huge picture of the World War II battleship Bismarck, “in all his glory,” as he described it.
The Bismarck was a Nazi warship and Adolf Hitler’s favorite, if you’re not as interested in history as Antoni claims to be.
I understand your concept, but where was he on January 6th?
Of course, he was outside the Capitol. According to a recent NBC News article, Antoni can be seen in multiple footage of the protests on January 6.
The video does not show Antoni entering the Capitol, but it does show him among the crowd almost an hour after insurrectionists took down police barricades. The White House told NBC that he was only a bystander and was there for neighboring meetings that day.
Curious about the Nazis? Not qualified? MAGA? An ideal applicant. the entire bundle. The ideal individual for the position.
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