The media rooms in the US will discuss this like a regular infotainment item, making it look like a normal controversy. Then it will pushed out from the news by some other circus act.
For many, this will feel like a defensible move or a minor mistake. If the public discourse is corrupted, the public will be corrupted. And so the whole house will come down, just as intended.
NullHypothesist · 3h ago
This is what corruption looks like.
taylodl · 2h ago
This is what a dictatorship looks like.
belter · 3h ago
This is when a micro black hole cross the plane of the solar system, and your reality fuses with the Onion
jleyank · 3h ago
I thought the Onion gave up as they could not come with satire anymore. People kept thinking it was real news or commentary.
rhelz · 2h ago
I'm as big of a critic of Trump as you are likely to find but......the previous jobs reports was revised DOWNWARD by over a quarter of a million jobs.
Sure, you expect the numbers to change as more data comes in. But...that's a pretty big misoverestimate. This is very problematic, as it actually MASKED some of the ill effects which Trump's policies have had.
Who knows if Trump would have actually moderated his policies if he had had a more accurate read sooner, but private companies rely on this data as well, and no doubt they have made decisions they wouldn't have if they had know the true numbers.
Trump certainly was mean-spirited in trying to frame this as a partisan issue, and downright disingenuous in some of his accusations. Nevertheless, >250,000 jobs everybody thought were there but weren't....yeah, that's a firing offense.
littlexsparkee · 2h ago
ADP crunches the numbers too and they were more in line with the revised estimates - there was nothing preventing companies from acting on that. How can you claim this is fireable without context about how the calculations/revisions occur and their side of the story? These trade policies are engendering so much uncertainty, combined with the shakeup in the federal workforce - honestly something like this was pretty foreseeable...
rhelz · 18m ago
// how can you claim this is fixable w/o ... //
Recall, her job wasn't to predict how many jobs would be created. Her job was to measure how many jobs were created.
Yeah, I'm sorry, but a plus-or-minus 250,000 margin of error is just too high. We have every right to expect more accurate measurements than that.
watwut · 2m ago
Nah, you are just reaching to excuse purely political firing.
belter · 2h ago
So they faked the numbers and then went out and...revised their fake numbers?
rhelz · 21m ago
No, they were not able to come up with accurate numbers in the first place. If it is somebody's job to report how many jobs were created, and they can't do that with any accuracy...well...they should lose their job, under any kind of administration.
belter · 15m ago
Erika Lee McEntarfer is an American labor economist with a 20 year career in government, confirmed by the Senate in a 86–8 vote.
You have to live in some alternate reality to think otherwise. Brace for the actual, very real, consequences of an economy where the numbers no longer command trust.
exceptione · 1h ago
> the previous jobs reports was revised DOWNWARD by over a quarter of a million jobs.
I will try to be not too snarky, but imagine what would happen if the president announces tariffs every other day then changing it on the next, creating extreme volatility and uncertainty for investors. Imagine what would happen if the president threatens allies with war of conquest. If he causes the dollar to tumble while tanking the bond markets. If he daily threatens to blow up the last public instance in the US that employs a modicum of integrity and competence.
Imagine how high the pressure would have been in the past months to paint rosy pictures and suppress bad news all around. And yet people keep falling for the dumb narratives.
Imagine how difficult it is to do economic projections when inflation is not recorded anymore. Instead the US public get inflation data as vibes now, as things are probably expected to develop so badly that even the corporate media rooms might not be able to downplay it enough. People might get tired hearing of Biden's age.
The cluster fuck is all self-made. On purpose.
rhelz · 20m ago
I'm not going to argue that the Trump administration isn't a self-made cluster fork. Of course it is, on a truly epic scale.
But her job wasn't to predict the number of jobs created, her job was to measure the number of jobs created. That is something you should be able to do more accurately than a plus-or-minus 250,000 margin of error.
For many, this will feel like a defensible move or a minor mistake. If the public discourse is corrupted, the public will be corrupted. And so the whole house will come down, just as intended.
Sure, you expect the numbers to change as more data comes in. But...that's a pretty big misoverestimate. This is very problematic, as it actually MASKED some of the ill effects which Trump's policies have had.
Who knows if Trump would have actually moderated his policies if he had had a more accurate read sooner, but private companies rely on this data as well, and no doubt they have made decisions they wouldn't have if they had know the true numbers.
Trump certainly was mean-spirited in trying to frame this as a partisan issue, and downright disingenuous in some of his accusations. Nevertheless, >250,000 jobs everybody thought were there but weren't....yeah, that's a firing offense.
Recall, her job wasn't to predict how many jobs would be created. Her job was to measure how many jobs were created.
Yeah, I'm sorry, but a plus-or-minus 250,000 margin of error is just too high. We have every right to expect more accurate measurements than that.
You have to live in some alternate reality to think otherwise. Brace for the actual, very real, consequences of an economy where the numbers no longer command trust.
I will try to be not too snarky, but imagine what would happen if the president announces tariffs every other day then changing it on the next, creating extreme volatility and uncertainty for investors. Imagine what would happen if the president threatens allies with war of conquest. If he causes the dollar to tumble while tanking the bond markets. If he daily threatens to blow up the last public instance in the US that employs a modicum of integrity and competence.
Imagine how high the pressure would have been in the past months to paint rosy pictures and suppress bad news all around. And yet people keep falling for the dumb narratives.
Imagine how difficult it is to do economic projections when inflation is not recorded anymore. Instead the US public get inflation data as vibes now, as things are probably expected to develop so badly that even the corporate media rooms might not be able to downplay it enough. People might get tired hearing of Biden's age.
The cluster fuck is all self-made. On purpose.
But her job wasn't to predict the number of jobs created, her job was to measure the number of jobs created. That is something you should be able to do more accurately than a plus-or-minus 250,000 margin of error.