Posted on 08/22/2024 7:12:56 AM PDT by george76
during the Bush administration, Democrats accused the BLS of cooking the books to make Bush look good. Then under Obama, the accusation switched. It switched back again under Trump.
Today, the estimate of new jobs created dropped by 818k.
Biden and Harris cooked the books. This isn’t any different than Enron.
They cooked the books during an election year to make themselves look good. The BLS went along with it. Shame on them.
I was listening to the Joe Rogan/Peter Thiel podcast driving from Grand Marais to Duluth. I have to hop on a plane to Detroit. My mom is in hospice. I saw her a few weeks ago and am going again.
Thiel’s contention is the bureaucracy and our “institutions” that we relied on for the last 70 years have fallen apart and just don’t work now. I agree. The answer isn’t to hire more people into the institutions. It’s to go 1000% outside them and let the private sector do it.
In addition, dismantle the institutions. We don’t need them. We don’t need all the non-profits which are NGOs (essentially evil orgs that carry out the wishes of a few rich people—>Bernie are you listening?). Do we need the BLS? Isn’t there a huge economic incentive to get those numbers right and won’t people that need it immediately pay a pretty penny for it?
As Friedman said, “there are no angels in government.” They are not some unaligned objective King Solomon.
The tax guy arbitrarily showed up at my two Grand Marais cabins yesterday. Started taking photos. What right does he have? I live on a PRIVATE road. It’s 2.5 miles long and gets no help from any government organization. When I mentioned my taxes keep going up the max year after year and that this road isn’t plowed or navigable in the winter, he shrugged his shoulders. We are his piggy bank and his best customers since we use none of the services and pay all the taxes.
The BLS is but one error and its error is a huge one. How many agencies lie or fudge or shade whatever they need to shade to benefit the party they want to benefit?
Vivek is correct. Get rid of them all save State/Defense and start over.
BTTT
Since they couldn’t lie enough about inflation, they need an excuse for the Fed rate cut.
“Get rid of them all save State/Defense”
Except those two are highly corrupted. State for decades. Defense in the last decade.
If they were lying all this time why fess up now?
But politically, this is a bad time for BLS to release this downward revision. Why not wait until after the election?
Seems like BLS guy that authorized the release at this time took a career risk.
I am legitimately surprised this was announced before the election.
BLS is coming clean so the Fed can lower interest rates next month to boost the economy or at least the stock market.
Biden is on his way out.
They can blame him for everything.
For them, if Harris wins…..great. Just keep going like they’ve been going.
If President Trump takes office, well, they’ve been stealing and hiding billions of Taxpayer dollars to get them through.
We are going to see more truth slowly seeping out.
There may be a few honest people who work there (just a few) who decided to expose the truth. Whoever did this may now be facing dire consequences for telling the truth.
Based on these data, the Fed will decrease interest rates, a boost for the economy before the election. It is a boost for Harris.
“Whoever did this may now be facing dire consequences for telling the truth.”
I know little about the BLS. Maybe they have a fixed schedule to release results, but it’s certainly an inopportune time for that particular statistic to be released.
It should be a fairly simple calculation I’d think. How many got a W2 this month compared to last?
That would be a better way.
Instead they survey households and employers.
I have stopped believing anything the government says unless I have solid corroboration.
Well they do lie about inflation. They routinely take out food and energy. And they lie about jobs. And they lie about crime statistics. The fact is, is they were honest about what is really happening, they would be kicked to the curb by anyone who was concerned about competent governance.
A decrease in the interest rates also lowers annual debt servicing costs, which are a trillion dollars. We are adding a trillion dollars to the national debt every hundred days. We will be at $36 trillion by the end of the year.
Credit card debt is at record levels: Americans continue to rack up credit card debt, hitting a record $1.14 trillion
Americans have increasingly been relying on credit cards to make ends meet, with 6 in 10 adults, or 60%, using credit cards to buy groceries in 2023, according to a May report by the Urban Institute.
Prolonged debt also plays a factor in the historic amount as more Americans fall behind on their credit card bills. About 7.18% of cardholders fell into delinquency in the second quarter, up from 5% in the previous quarter, Fed statistics show.
"More people are carrying more debt for longer periods of time," Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate, said in a statement.
Americans paid down some of their credit card debt in 2020, using pandemic-related federal stimulus funds, Rossman noted. But beginning in 2021, credit card balances "rocketed upward by 48%, fueled by a post-pandemic boom in services spending as well as high inflation and high interest rates," he added.
Compounding the problem is the soaring price of plastic, as interest rates on credit cards also continue to reach record highs. The average interest rate on a new credit card is now at 24.84%, the highest since LendingTree started tracking rates in 2019.
To be sure, both credit card debt and credit card interest rates could decline if the Federal Reserve decides to cut its benchmark rate in September — or perhaps even sooner.
The time for a rate cut "is approaching, and if we do get the data we hope we get, then reduction of our policy rate could be on the table at our September meeting," Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said last week.
We are being played again by this release of BLS data. It is a ploy to buy voters by reducing interest rates. And it will reduce USG debt servicing costs. Yes, inflation will increase in the long run, but the election is not in the long run.
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