Before the election, Donald Trump suggested that the Department of Labor is fudging unemployment figures. It's one of his most ridiculous conspiracy theories.
|
Listen To This Story
 |
Donald Trump and his sycophants, including likely secretary of state Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), floated an insane conspiracy theory before the election: the Department of Labor was fudging unemployment data to make Democrats look good.
Dismayed by job creation under President Joe Biden that far outpaced Trump’s, as well as a sizable downward revision of payrolls announced in the summer, this crackpot theory never made any sense (which we have pointed out repeatedly).
However, to MAGA voters, it certainly felt as though it might be right, and that’s all that matters these days.
The final nail in the coffin of this nonsensical suggestion came on Friday, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) not only announced that the US economy added 227,000 new jobs but also did an upward revision of the previous two unemployment reports that showed that nonfarm payrolls increased by 56,000 more than previously estimated.
That is especially significant because the October report was the worst of Biden’s entire presidency… and it was made public four days before the election. Now we know that the economy actually added three times as many jobs in October as the figure announced back then (up from 12,000 to 36,000, which is still not great).
In other words, while Trump accused BLS of “fraudulently manipulating” the statistics to help Biden, it actually understated job creation in the most crucial report of the entire presidency, which just so happened to be the worst of them all.
And then we learned today that the follow-up report was much better than expected.
While unemployment ticked up to 4.2 percent, it also showed that hourly wages have increased by 4.0 percent over the past year, which means that they have outpaced inflation during that time.
With all of that being said, now that Trump has the thought in his head that employment data can be fudged, the analysts at BLS shouldn’t be surprised to get a call from the White House soon.
Although even Trump’s own BLS commissioner William Beach said that the numbers couldn’t be faked (in this case referring to the revisions), the incoming president may just try to test that theory.
That is especially true because his job creation will be held against a standard that he set himself: Right before the election, Trump suggested that a growth of 250,000 jobs per month was “almost automatic” (even though he only exceeded that number seven times, which amounts to 15 percent of the months he was in office).
Of course, Trump won’t care about any of this right now. After all, he got elected… and his conspiracy theories, lies, and bravado helped get him there.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
