https://www.aol.com/news/hiltzik-latest-government-inflation-gdp-110000684.html
I see we already have at least one person jumping on the "Trump fired all the people who gave real data and replaced them with hand-picked sycophants" so the data is fake bus. Sorry, but that is 100% not true and if you read the article, the economists who are criticizing the data are NOT accusing the data of being fake.
Some BLS staff resigned/retired but people were NOT fired for refusing to go along with Trump. And the people who left were not replaced at all (there is a hiring freeze) so that is actually one of the issues with the data - there are not enough people to do process all the data properly.
I really wish people would get it into their heads that it would be almost imppossible for the Trump administration to "fake" data. It is not happening, and if an attempt is made to do it in the future, it will be outed immediately.
The key takeaway from the article is this:
The economists whose jobs involve scrutinizing those statistics to glean what they really mean don't view them as unalloyed support for Trumponomics. Quite the contrary. Many see them as artifacts of the long government shutdown, which halted the collection of data that go into those reports, severely distorting the results. Furthermore, they expect the flaws in those reports to persist well into 2026, undermining their usefulness as true economic indicators.
Here's some of the REAL criticisms from the article:
The highest-earning 10% of households now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, according to Moody's Analytics. That's the highest level since the data began to be collected in the 1980s, when the rich accounted for only about one-third of spending.
This is significantly skewing the GDP making it look higher than but in reality not indicating a healthy economy for most of the population.
The government shutdown, which lasted 43 days from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12, was the most important cause of gaps in the collected data for the consumer price index calculation. As Swonk noted in a social media post, cutbacks at the BLS had already reduced the staff assigned to sampling prices by 25%. That prompted the agency to substitute "imputed" numbers for hard data. "Those cases can show up as zeros in the percent change of the release," Swonk wrote — obviously lowering the bottom-line figure. A sampling scheduled for mid-October had to be canceled, so figures dating from August were used instead — concealing any price increases in subsequent months.
A major problem concerns housing costs, which account for about one-third of the data inputs for the CPI. Because the BLS was unable to collect rental data for October, it implied that the monthly change in rents was 0% in October — further skewing the reported CPI lower. Experts say it will take at least six months to use newly collected data to provide a reliable estimate of housing inflation.
The delay in sampling, Swonk adds, means that some seasonal price phenomena were missed. She points specifically to airfares — the originally scheduled sampling would have incorporated a pre-Thanksgiving run-up in fares, but by the time the data were collected fares had returned to a non-holiday level. Inflation data also are incorporated into GDP estimates — the lower the inflation rate, Swonk notes, the better the GDP looks. An artificially reduced inflation rate will translate into higher reported GDP growth.
Much more in the article.
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