What would happen if USA started faking its economic data? Lessons from others

24 ryan_j_naughton 5 8/18/2025, 9:15:37 PM cnn.com ↗

Comments (5)

treetalker · 2h ago
Bold to implicitly assume that faking isn't already going on.
bediger4000 · 3h ago
> While there’s no indication the data has been rigged (assertions from the White House aside)

Weird that more or less official pronunciations of the US President get waved off as ignorable. But it does reveal CNN's biases.

RealityVoid · 2h ago
The current US president is an incoherent, inconsistent mess. So it's perfectly understandable when one ignores what he says.
garciasn · 3h ago
Trump nominated E.J. Antoni to lead the BLS. According to CBS News here is his background some of his recent comments (source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-bureau-of-labor-statistic...).

>Antoni is a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, and he holds a doctorate in economics from Northern Illinois University. He's defended Mr. Trump's economic policy moves in the past, including the president's tariff strategy. He has also criticized the BLS for low response rates and questioned the agency's methodology, calling its health insurance figures "phoney baloney" last year and at one point joking that "the 'L' is silent" in BLS' name.

>"DOGE needs to take a chainsaw to the BLS...," he wrote in a November post on X.

>"There are better ways to collect, process, and disseminate data—that is the task for the next BLS commissioner, and only consistent delivery of accurate data in a timely manner will rebuild the trust that has been lost over the last several years," he wrote shortly after Mr. Trump fired the former BLS chief.

Please read through Erika McEntarfer's Wikipedia page and then EJ Antoni's and decide, for yourself, who may be better suited for the role:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_McEntarfer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.J._Antoni

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As someone who has made a career out of working in analytics, data engineering, and data science, I can tell you that I'm very much a skeptic, but I value, highly, honesty, experience, rigor, and business acumen. Only one of these two has those.

exe34 · 2h ago
did you just wake up from a coma? have you not heard of TACO?

Trump says whatever will make him the most profits, not what is true.

e.g. https://youtube.com/shorts/YhoT8MGf-lQ?si=RZX95KtzwVY3P6m9