Unemployment truthers

[stpioc]

Throughout the campaign, Trump openly mocked employment data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis as “phony” and “totally fiction.” His tone changed when he wanted to take credit for a good jobs report. In March, Sean Spicer said at a press briefing that the President wanted to make clear that the unemployment rate “may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.” The White House press corps laughed, but, to government statisticians, the words sounded less like a joke and more like a threat. “When I saw that, I said, ‘Wow. You said the numbers were wrong,’ ” Kathleen Utgoff, who ran the B.L.S. under President George W. Bush, told me. “ ‘Now you are politicizing them.’ ” She said that she is “terrified” by the President’s willingness to declare the government data “very real” or fake news based solely on how they reflect on him.

Trump’s Abuse of Government Data - The New YorkerAmerica has never seen a party less caring than 21st-century Republicans | Opinion | The Guardian