Of course the Bureau of Labor Statistic (BLS) is wrong about levels of employment or lack thereof. How could it be right? Precisely because employment figures are valuable within the broad marketplace, why on earth would anyone possessing a skill associated with divining the figures toil at the BLS?
It’s a question worth asking as the self-serious on the left and right bemoan Trump’s garish firing of the proverbial scale. The horrors! How dare Trump blind the global economy?
Except we can still see. There's nothing to Trump’s action last Friday. The more pertinent critique of Trump, and for the matter DOGE, is that the BLS wasn't shut down in January.
That’s because the BLS is the embodiment of government waste. It’s been a while, but memory says that the annual cost to the BLS for coming up with the employment report is something like $600 million. That's the number arrived at by Jason Trennert of Strategas Partners.
The perpetually angsty will say the private economy requires information produced by the public sector to function, but that’s not true. If we ignore what’s true, that the public sector shouldn’t be subsidizing the private sector as is, we can’t ignore that what the BLS produces is superfluous and arguably less accurate than private sources of information.
Evidence supporting the above claim can be found in the happy fact that payroll company ADP produces its own employment report every month, along with surely a multitude of other reports about hiring in the U.S. Whom do you trust? A payroll company’s detailed information on employment, or the drones at the BLS?
The main thing is that if Trump had done the right thing and shuttered the BLS rather than yelling at the scoreboard, he would have achieved something much greater than revealing an already evident petty side. By sunsetting the BLS, Trump would have made a much bigger political and economic point that what’s necessary to the private sector already exists privately precisely because it’s necessary to the private sector.
Translated, much of what government does is not only unconstitutional (as Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane has long put it, there’s nothing about “growth” or “employment” in the Constitution), it’s also costly excess. And it’s not just the production of the unemployment report.
The BLS also calculates the Consumer Price Index (CPI), but does anyone seriously think grocery stores and other commercial entities aren’t already generating voluminous reports on market prices? The non-profit Conference Board measures consumer confidence, but it’s a safe bet that Visa, Amex and Discover run much more accurate reports about the state of the U.S. consumer. The Bureau of Economic Analysis within the Department of Commerce calculates the worthless figure that is Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which sounds like nothing more than a full employment concept for economists. The speculation here is that as with credit card usage and debt, McDonald’s, FedEx, Walmart, and Amazon generate much more accurate measures of the U.S. economy. As for the future economy, your smartphone updates the stock market all day and every day.
Which is the point. While surely serious thinkers on the left and right clutch their government information pearls, the private sector more accurately produces all the information we need, absent the cost. Trump did the right thing for the wrong reasons. Much worse, we still have the BLS.
