Imagine you go to a doctor and run some blood tests. A few days later you get the results and don’t like them. What do you next? Maybe you start eating more Cheerios to help with your cholesterol. Well, Trump would just dump that doctor and find a new one who would tell him he’s perfectly healthy…at least that’s what he did to the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The US is known for having the world’s most respected, apolitical data systems. Trump’s undermining of this system could jeopardize US policymaking for decades and is eerily reminiscent of what Hugo Chávez did during his rule in Venezuela.
Getting rid of the BLS commissioner is scary enough on its own, but couple that with the echo chamber in the White House and you have a full-on horror movie brewing.
Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado today. We’re talking about the U.S. economy from a numbers point of view. The issue is that a couple of weeks back, Donald Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is basically the institutional in the US government that generates a whole lot of the data that guides policymaking from a global point of view.
U.S. government statistics are generally considered to be above world class. They’re by far the best on the planet because they’re differentiated, they’re apolitical, and the United States government collects touch points from local, state, and national policymakers in order to build a really good picture that businesses and government can use to help make decisions. Well, a number came out on new job creation that Trump hated, so he fired the head of the BLS within hours and says he’ll replace her with someone who can actually do the work, which is anyway, the idea are three things here.
Number one, the idea that one person just decides what the day is going to be is beyond asinine. The only place that happens with any reliability is places like Russia, where they decide what the numbers are going to be before they publish them, and then just make them up. And they don’t even have a functional statistics section in the government anymore.
The statistics are the end results of not just dozens of people, but thousands of people across the country. And the only way you can get a politicized justice stick is if you don’t just go after people at the head, but you go after the rank and file statisticians, which is something the Trump administration has already started, not just for jobs data, but GDP data.
And that’s something that’s going to make it much harder for the US government to target policies for decades to come. It will take us a generation to rebuild that expertise. That’s problem one. Number two, if you’re going to get cheesed off about a statistic, this isn’t even the one you should be angry about. The jobs report is an estimate based on a series of estimates based on a series of surveys, which are in themselves estimates.
It’s not a very realistic picture of the economy from my point of view. And it goes through phases of, revisions over three months. And so the idea that the number that Trump didn’t like is what it’s going to be like three months from now. I think it’s kind of silly in the first place. Anyway, if you’re looking for a more accurate statistic, you want to look for first time unemployment claims.
So the jobs report indicates jobs that have been created, but based on estimates and estimates and estimates, the first time unemployment claims is based on people who have lost their jobs because they file for coverage. And that is a hard number. That’s a real number. So here’s the QR code. If that is a statistic you’re interested in.
The fact that Trump doesn’t know this is concerning, because anyone who is working in, say, the Commerce Department is going to know which statistics are better than others, and the Commerce secretary is a guy by the name of Howard. Let make it will basically tell Trump anything he wants to hear. And so we have just gotten a very good example of the echo chamber that is developed in the Trump White House, where it’s not just that no one is speaking truth to power, it’s just the truth.
Can’t even make it in the room in paper form. Okay, third thing, the president that is most similar to Donald Trump and going after the statisticians, isn’t g of China. Those people are dead. It isn’t Putin of Russia. Those people were let go 20 years ago. It’s Hugo Chavez, the deceased leader of Venezuela. When he became president in 1998.
He basically went through the entire institutions of Venezuela, which at the time was generally considered to be the best well run of the Latin American states. High standard of living, good educational system, good infrastructure, pretty good policy. They basically had an oil largesse and they used it on the people. You’re crazy idea. And he basically went after the entire set of institutions that supported that system, root and branch, until the only information he got was the information he wanted to hear.
It’s very similar to what we’re seeing right now. And if you look at some of the things that Donald Trump is doing with, say, energy policy, wanting to produce more crude, say, from public lands and only sell it to countries that he has a handshake deal with. This is very Hugo Chavez. Hugo Chavez would sell the crude at a discounted rate, only to markets that he was ideologically aligned with wherever they happen to be. Cuba, of course, with the top of that list,
Donald Trump personally is basically setting up, trying to set up something similar where the crude is only sold to specific markets, where he feels he’s beaten them into aggressive submission with European Union. Be at the top of the list. That means less income by a significant amount and de facto subsidization of those countries for personal and political reasons.
So this is not simply an issue of a few numbers. This is something that allows the US government to function, and allows it to function in a way that benefits the president. But until some people in the white House grow some spines and speak truth to power, which means I’ll probably be fired the next day, we’re probably not going to get a lot of that.
