Columnist for former newspaper NYT implies Trump lied in unemployment report

The nice thing about being a leftist is that you never have to let facts get in the way of your claims. You can keep your doctor. Colin Kaepernick is a true American hero. Joe Biden is a brilliant and fully sentient human being. And Paul Krugman has the inside scoop on the Labor Department jobs report, thus knowing Trump falsified the numbers.

The economic genius tweeted:

This being the Trump era, you can't completely discount the possibility that they've gotten to the BLS, but it's much more likely that the models used to produce these numbers — they aren't really raw data — have gone haywire in a time of pandemic 3/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 5, 2020

Does Krugman think for one second that the Bureau of Labor Statistics would protect Trump if he made a false claim?

The May jobs report, released last Friday, was expected to show a 19.8 percent unemployment rate.  Instead it revealed a rate of 13.3 percent.

Even Jason Furman, an Obama-era chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, blasted Krugman within half an hour, saying Trump could not have doctored the report. He added that Krugman's implication undermined the integrity of career Labor Department officials.

It also shows us that Krugman is a liar or a total fool. Of course, both of these things can be true at the same time.

There is absolutely no way that Trump could have compromised the BLS. None.

Furman tweeted:

BLS has 2,400 career staff of enormous integrity and one political appointee with no scope to change this number. https://t.co/Cden6rQyN6 

— Jason Furman (@jasonfurman) June 5, 2020

New York Times contributor and Brookings Institution fellow Justin Wolfers also denounced Krugman's claim:

This is a bad tweet.
Paul, you're right to point out that the underlying models/processes used to produce jobs numbers are less reliable during a pandemic.
But these data weren't tampered with and Paul knows it. The economic debate doesn't need this garbage innuendo. Do better https://t.co/R6tLHldF00
— Justin Wolfers (@JustinWolfers) June 5, 2020

Krugman, realizing nobody was taking his part even on the left, later apologized:

"I was just covering myself, because so many weird things have happened lately," he wrote.

Getting a lot of outraged pushback over even allowing the possibility of something amiss at BLS. I was just covering myself, because so many weird things have happened lately. But I apologize for any suggestion that a highly professional agency might have been corrupted. 1/
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 5, 2020

President Trump took to the bully pulpit to announce the jobs numbers. Who could blame him?

"They thought the number would be a loss of nine million jobs, and it was a gain of almost three million jobs," the President said. "This leads us on to a long period of growth. We'll go back to having the greatest economy anywhere in the world … and I think we're going to have a very good upcoming few months."

Or a very volatile upcoming few months, as the market seems to indicate.


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