For most of us, the huge revisions in Bureau of Labor Statistics standards was reason enough for President Trump to fire its director.
After all, the Federal Reserve sets its benchmark interest rates, affecting the entire economy, based on this data. It really needs to be something close to accurate.
Being a survey, it isn't always perfect. But it ought to be close. Pollsters, after all, can get pretty close. IBD/TIPP always gets close.
Turns out BLS hasn't been close, not by a longshot, according to historic research dating to 2009, from Issues & Insights, who are my old colleagues from the Investor's Business Daily editorial page, when they had one:
We decided to find out and reviewed the BLS’s monthly jobs data going back to 2009. What we found was deeply troubling.
We compared its initial report on jobs each month to the actual figures released months later. Our conclusion: its initial jobs reports have been absolutely and completely unreliable for years – often wildly optimistic or wildly pessimistic – regardless of who was president.
In the 199 months we examined, the BLS’s initial estimate of jobs gained or lost missed the mark by an average of 49.6%!
Only 15 times did its initial estimate come within 3% of being right. (Given the huge sample size, you’d think its margin of error would consistently be tiny.)
Some months, the miss was staggering.
In August 2011, to cite one example, the BLS said no new jobs had been created. Zero. Turns out, 132,000 were created that month.
In September 2017, it first said that the economy lost 33,000 jobs – which made big news because, as Politico put it at the time, it was “the first time in seven years” that had happened. In fact, the economy had created 88,000 jobs that month.
In January 2021 – the last month of Trump’s first term – the BLS initially reported that the economy had added a mere 49,000 jobs. The actual number was 365,000.
The report cites example after example. Nobody should be that inaccurate. Obviously, there was a problem with their methodology, including their capacity to get businesses to respond, as the report notes. Some of the worst, the very worst revisions happened during the Biden administration, tending to make him look good when he should have looked bad.
Last August – when Biden was president – the BLS said that it had overcounted new jobs by an eye-popping 818,000 between March 2023 and March 2024. That’s a massive mistake that should have caused heads to roll.
But then six months later, it issued a revision to that revision, saying that it had only overcounted the number of jobs created in those 12 months by 598,000. That a difference of 27%.
No one at the BLS lost their jobs over that screw-up, either.
The report notes that this kind of inaccuracy would not be tolerated in the private sector.
Combine it with the massive number of potential inside trading case scandals at that agency, where data was released to privileged outsiders ahead of everyone else, as I wrote here on August 4, along with bizarre subjective data added in, such as 'equivalent to rent' and it doesn't take long for data released to be utterly meaningless because it simply isn't true. The private sector indeed would not tolerate this culture of failure, who would want to pay for it? But government does, and Trump is changing government.
Good job, President Trump.
Image: PxHere // CCO public domain