Mr. Trump sniffs a deep-state conspiracy. “Today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” the president huffed on Truth Social. Where’s the evidence? There is none.
The BLS commissioner has traditionally been a nonpartisan post, and the Senate confirmed Ms. McEntarfer 86-8 last year. Yet Mr. Trump asserted, again without evidence, that Ms. McEntarfer “faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory” and revised down the numbers after the election by 818,000. Also false.
The truth is that the jobs numbers have become more volatile in recent years because of declining business survey response rates. It’s similar to the problem political pollsters face getting representative samples. And Mr. Trump’s trade and immigration policies may be making monthly data less reliable.
It helps to understand how the BLS produces its monthly jobs report. The bureau surveys some 631,000 workplaces by a variety of media, including phone, web and even fax. Many businesses don’t respond every month, but the BLS continues to collect data and revise its findings over the next two months.
The survey’s overall response rate has declined to 43% from 60% before the pandemic, and small businesses are less likely than bigger ones to respond, especially in the first month. The jobs estimate can also be off in either direction by 136,000 in any given month because of statistical chance. Such variations tend to even out over several months.
Also writing wisely on Trump’s firing of the head of the BLS is National Review‘s Dominic Pino. A slice:
The original estimate for the number of jobs in the month of June was 159,724,000. Then, after the revision with better data, it was 159,466,000. That’s a 0.161 percent correction, based on higher-quality information that didn’t exist at the time of the original estimate.
So, no, the BLS is not incompetent, and it does not have an easy job at all. The reasons for revisions are incredibly boring and technical and have nothing to do with politics or ideology. Or at least they didn’t, until the president fired the BLS commissioner because he didn’t like the jobs numbers. Now, the incentives have changed, and there is a reason to cook the books out of self-preservation.
And here are Tyler Cowen’s thoughts sparked by the sacking of the BLS commissioner.
Placing new taxes on imported products, however, is expected to raise the cost of everyday goods. Lower-income Americans spend more of their earnings on those more expensive goods, meaning the tariffs amount to a larger tax increase for them compared to richer Americans.
Tariffs have begun to bleed into consumer prices, with many companies saying they will have to start raising prices as a result of added costs. And analysts expect the tariffs to weigh on the performance of the economy overall, which in turn could reduce the amount of traditional income tax revenue the government collects every year.
“Social justice ideology is rigid and uncompromising.”
There is no mystery about what ails air traffic control in this country: It is run by the government, which is ill-suited to the task. Worse yet, the agency that’s in charge of providing air traffic control, the Federal Aviation Administration, is also the agency that regulates it — an inherent conflict of interest. As journalist John Tierney put it in a recent essay for City Journal: “The FAA is supposed to be a watchdog, but we’ve put it in charge of watching itself.”
That’s only part of the problem. Because the FAA is an arm of the government, its operations, including air traffic control, are inevitably politicized. Since the agency has to be reauthorized annually, its funding is tied not to market forces but to the priorities of politicians, lobbyists, and interest groups. That chronic budgetary uncertainty has often forced the FAA to defer system upgrades and limit hiring — which is why the system is beset by outdated hardware and perpetually understaffed towers.
Happily, there is a straightforward solution: Get the federal government out of the air traffic control business.
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Our neighbor to the north long ago made the leap to nongovernmental air traffic control. In 1996, Canada created Nav Canada, a not-for-profit corporation that is fully funded by users of the system — that is, airlines and other aircraft operators — and thus doesn’t cost taxpayers a cent. The results have been almost uniformly positive. Nav Canada funds its own modernization and operates on a solid financial footing. The company has hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve — a stark contrast to the FAA’s perennial shortfalls.
Canada boasts state-of-the-art satellite navigation systems. Almost 10 years ago, The Wall Street Journal’s aviation columnist, Scott McCartney, marveled at how flying south from Canada to the United States was “like time travel for pilots … you leave a modern air-traffic control system run by a company and enter one run by the government struggling to catch up.”
In Canadian ATC towers, there are no strips of paper to shuffle. Instead, controllers update information about each flight on touch screens and pass the information to one another electronically. “Requests for altitude changes are automatically checked for conflicts before they even pop up on controllers’ screens,” McCartney wrote. “Computers look 20 minutes ahead for any planes potentially getting too close to each other. Flights are monitored by a system more accurate than radar, allowing them to be safely spaced closer together to add capacity and reduce delays.”
