DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Palus Politicus Liberation Day Part Deux

Yeah that’s the thing, you need to commit. Bad certainty is better than no certainty.

Once he appoints someone to rig the figures it those numbers will look much better.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg3xrrzdr0o

Trump fires lead official on economic data as tariffs cause market drop



US President Donald Trump has fired the boss of one of America's most important economic institutions hours after weaker-than-expected jobs data stoked further alarm about his tariff policy.

On social media Trump claimed that Erika McEntarfer, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), had "RIGGED" jobs figures "to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad".

The unprecedented move by the White House sparked accusations that Trump was politicising economic data.

The Senate's top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said the president was "a bad leader" who "shoots the messenger" for weak statistics.

US stock markets were rattled on Friday after Trump, a Republican, forged ahead with his plans to raise import tariffs on goods from countries around the world.

Figures were then released by BLS showing that employers in the US added just 73,000 jobs in July, far below forecasts of 109,000 new roles.

The agency also revised down employment growth in May and June, reporting 250,000 fewer jobs than previously thought. It was the largest downward revision in employment figures - apart from the Covid-era - since 1979.

It is not unusual for the BLS to amend jobs figures as more data comes to light, however. During Joe Biden's presidency, statistics for 12 months over 2023-4 were retroactively revised downward by 818,000 jobs.

Though this month's changes were much larger than usual, analysts said the updates were consistent with other data showing slowdown.

The president posted on Truth Social on Friday: "The Economy is BOOMING under 'TRUMP.'"

But Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, said the job figures were a "gamechanger", adding that "the labor market is deteriorating quickly" because of uncertainty caused by Trump's tariffs.

The president has dismissed concerns about his tariff plans, which he says will boost manufacturing in the US and rebalance global trade.

But data this week and a string of updates from companies on tariff costs have made those forecasts harder to ignore.

On the decision to sack McEntarfer, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said: "Firing the head of a key government agency because you don't like the numbers they report, which come from surveys using long established procedures, is what happens in authoritarian countries, not democratic ones."

Friends of BLS, a group whose members include two former commissioners of the agency, said: "When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science."

McEntarfer called her time as commissioner "the honour of my life", while describing the agency's work as "vital and important".

Leading US stock market indices all closed sharply lower on Friday.

Trump has attacked key economic figures in the past, most recently Jerome Powell, chair of the US Federal Reserve, as the central bank continues to leave interest rates unchanged.

Trump is demanding a cut, but the Fed is holding fire until it sees the full impact of tariffs on the US economy.

In the aftermath of the jobs report, Trump launched a further salvo at Powell, stating he should also be put "out to pasture".

A member of the Fed's rate-setting committee, Adriana Kugler, is resigning early giving Trump an opportunity to install someone new. Her term was due to end next January.

The head of the Labour Department, which oversees the BLS, wrote on social media that the agency's deputy commissioner William Wiatrowski would step into the role during the search for a replacement.

The Labour Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Some analysts speculated that the jobs data could reflect a hit to small businesses, which are typically slower to respond to surveys and are especially vulnerable to tariffs.

McEntarfer worked for the government for more than 20 years before being nominated by Biden to lead the BLS in 2023. She was later confirmed near unanimously by the US Senate, including by current Vice-President JD Vance, who was then an Ohio senator.

Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, defended Entarfer, saying she had conducted herself with "great integrity".

"It is imperative that decisionmakers understand that government statistics are unbiased and of the highest quality. By casting doubt on that, the President is damaging the United States," he wrote on social media.

Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the firing raised serious alarm.

"For six months, I've said that threats to economic data have been more collateral damage than intentional harm. No longer. Firing the head of the BLS is five-alarm intentional harm to the integrity of US economic data and the entire statistical system," he wrote on social media.

Trump defended the decision and said her departure was needed to ensure there were "people that we can trust" in these posts.

"Why should anybody trust numbers?" the president told reporters when leaving the White House on Friday.

"I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election, and there were other times - so you know what I did? I fired her, and you know what I did? The right thing."

Tariffs
The fight over data comes as Trump remakes trade policy, hitting goods from countries around the world with new tariffs ranging from 10% to 50%.

When Trump put forward similar plans in April, shares in the US tumbled more than 10% in a week as concerns spread to the dollar and bond markets.

The stock market recovered after he suspended some of the most drastic measures, leaving in place a less punishing, more expected 10% levy. In recent weeks, indexes in the US have been trading around all-time highs.

The latest measures are less extreme than what Trump first put forward in April, but they will still push the average tariff rate to roughly 17%, up from less than 2.5% at the start of the year.

"The reality is Trump got emboldened by the fact that markets came right back," Michael Gayed, a portfolio manager for The Free Markets ETF, told the BBC's Opening Bell. "Now he's going to try his luck again."

I’d call myself mostly a centrist— certainly left-leaning on social issues, but very fiscally conservative. It’s amusing (or frustrating) how some assumed my concerns about spending and national debt are just partisan reactions. Nope—I’ve cared about this under every administration and I always will.

BUT ...at this point, I (almost) hope the next Democratic president (and yes, there will be one eventually) mirrors Trump’s playbook exactly—executive orders, hardball tactics, the whole abuse of office and bullying of other branches that are supposed to be checks and balances .... Not because it’s the 'centrist' approach, but because the system is so broken that maybe the only way to force accountability is for MAGA to face its own tactics turned against them.

No, you are not a centrist. Dawglover neither was nor is a conservative. Anyone and everyone who doesn't walk the trump company line is now a "liberal progressive who is trying to destroy America" Or as Peen would call them, "Communists". There is no such thing as a centrist. You're either all in or you're the enemy.

The Trump administration takes a very Orwellian turn

Back in March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeted at the Smithsonian Institution that began as follows: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Despite the high-minded rhetoric, many worried the order was instead a thinly veiled effort to rewrite history more to Trump’s liking. The order, for example, cited a desire to remove “improper ideology” – an ominous phrase, if there ever was one – from properties like the Smithsonian.

Those concerns were certainly bolstered this week. We learned that some historical information that recently vanished from the Smithsonian just so happens to have been objective history that Trump really dislikes: a reference to his two impeachments.

Back in March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeted at the Smithsonian Institution that began as follows: “Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

Despite the high-minded rhetoric, many worried the order was instead a thinly veiled effort to rewrite history more to Trump’s liking. The order, for example, cited a desire to remove “improper ideology” – an ominous phrase, if there ever was one – from properties like the Smithsonian.

Those concerns were certainly bolstered this week. We learned that some historical information that recently vanished from the Smithsonian just so happens to have been objective history that Trump really dislikes: a reference to his two impeachments.

The Smithsonian said that a board containing the information was removed from the National Museum of American History last month after a review of the museum’s “legacy content.” The board had been placed in front of an existing impeachment exhibit in September 2021.

Just to drive this home: The exhibit itself is about “Limits of Presidential Power.” And suddenly examples of the biggest efforts by Congress to limit Trump’s were gone.

It wasn’t immediately clear that the board was removed pursuant to Trump’s executive order. The Washington Post, which broke the news, reported that a source said the content review came after pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director.

In other words, we don’t know all the details of precisely how this went down – including whether the removal was specifically requested, or whether museum officials decided it might be a good way to placate Trump amid pressure. The Smithsonian said in a statement Saturday that it was “not asked by any administration” or government official to remove content and that an updated version of the exhibit will ultimately mention all impeachment efforts, including Trump’s.

But it’s all pretty Orwellian. And it’s not the only example.

Trump has always been rather blatant about his efforts to rewrite history with self-serving falsehoods and rather shameless in applying pressure on the people who would serve as impartial referees of the current narrative. But this week has taken things to another level.

On Friday, Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This came just hours after that agency delivered Trump some very bad news: the worst non-Covid three-month jobs numbers since 2010.

Some Trump allies have attempted to put a good face on this, arguing that Dr. Erika McEntarfer’s removal was warranted because large revisions in the job numbers betrayed shoddy work. But as he did with the firing of then-FBI Director James B. Comey eight years ago, Trump quickly undermined all that. He told Newsmax that “we fired her because we didn’t believe the numbers today.”

To the extent Trump did lay out an actual evidence-based case for firing McEntarfer, that evidence was conspiratorial and wrong, as CNN’s Daniel Dale documented Friday.

And even some Republican senators acknowledged this might be precisely as draconian and self-serving as it looked. Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, for one, called it “kind of impetuous” to fire the BLS head before finding out whether the new numbers were actually wrong.

“It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate and that they’re not what the president had hoped for,” said Lummis, who is not often a Trump critic.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina added that if Trump “just did it because they didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”

Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both worried that Trump’s move would make it so people can’t trust the data the administration is putting out.

And that’s the real problem here. It’s not so much that Trump appears to be firing someone as retaliation; it’s the message it sends to everyone else in a similar position. The message is that you might want that data and those conclusions to be to Trump’s liking, or else.

It’s a recipe for getting plenty of unreliable data and conclusions. And even to the extent that information is solid, it will seed suspicions about the books having been cooked – both among regular Americans and, crucially, among those making key decisions that impact the economy. What happens if the next jobs report is great? Will the markets believe it?

We’ve certainly seen plenty of rather blunt Trump efforts to control such narratives and rewrite history before. A sampling:

He engaged in a yearslong effort to make Jan. 6 defendants who attacked the Capitol in his name out to be sympathetic patriots, even calling them “hostages,” before pardoning them.

His administration’s efforts to weed out diversity, equity and inclusion from the government often ensnared things that merely celebrated Black people and women.

He and his administration have at times taken rather dim views of the free speech rights of those who disagree with them, including talking about mere protests – i.e. not necessarily violence – as being “illegal.” A loyalist US attorney at one point threatened to pursue people who criticized then-Trump ally Elon Musk even for non-criminal behavior.

Trump has repeatedly suggested criticism of judges he likes should be illegal, despite regularly attacking judges he doesn’t like.

His term began with the portraits of military leaders who clashed with him being removed from the Pentagon. It also began with a massive purge of independent inspectors general charged with holding the administration to account.

All of it reinforces the idea that Trump is trying to consolidate power by pursuing rather heavy-handed and blatant tactics.

But if there’s a week that really drove home how blunt these efforts can be, it might be this one.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-administration-takes-very-orwellian-162242581.html