>which he promised during the campaign would cut federal spending by $2 trillion a year by ***reading random tweets*** ferreting out waste<
I'm absolutely LOVING the uber-drollness of the post-Times Paul Krugman. LOL. Dr. Krugman, you totally could have a side hustle editing The Onion, or maybe as a staff writer for somebody like Colbert.
Totally! Just love the humor when dealing with this awful, awful, depressing reality.
"Were you surprised to learn that Musk’s obviously fraudulent venture was a fraud? If so, you really shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery." Ha, ha, wild and wacky.
I posted a TikTok saying this exact same thing a few weeks ago and even mentioned the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a likely target. It was taken down as misinformation. 🤣
The first Trump administration already tried this with Covid deaths. It seems self evident they will try it with other data providing agencies.
I've been thinking of that book, "Persopolis" about life in Iran. Sadly I exect that someone will be writing a similar book about life in the USA during the Trump regime. I hope there's enough evidence that elections in 2026 slam the brakes on.
What’s crazy is Trump believes his first term was a failure but his supporters believe he was successful. Bessent’s 3 x 3% means he believes Obama’s 2014-2016 was more successful than Trump first 3 years. Krugman should write about how Obama actually achieved Bessent’s goals while Trump did not because of his tax cuts. So basically had Trump just played golf and not signed Ryan’s tax cuts then he would have achieved 3 x 3%.
I hadn't. I was just thinking of it when I read the article. What it says to me is that for Trump, words are the thing and the thing is not the thing. He is living in a la-la land of talky-talky-talky where we can say whatever we want and if it is a properly constructed adjective-noun-verb sentence, it should be accepted as the way of the world. (This is a different approach to the Bush's who often got facts right, but had trouble with the words things. Should we demand more of our leaders? Nah.) I would like nothing more than some reality to intrude inconveniently in his life before he causes it to intrude in ours, but I expect the white house will be insulated against such things if they can at all manage it. Fortunately, when the deplorables become upset, I expect he will listen. It may take them a while to get around to root cause though, so we'll have to blame the immigrants, Jewish space lasers, and whatever else we can imagine first. It is depressing.
We voted to go through some things.
We will go through some things.
Hopefully it will build character. It seems in short supply.
The BLS is a necessary resource for small business owners to justify the amount of their self-paid wages to the IRS under a S-Corp. It can also be helpful for employees who mistakenly think they are underpaid. (Hey! We are all underpaid.) I don't see this as positive for business owners.
Safe to assume he will. Several states are already burying data on things like maternal and infant mortality rates (Texas, Georgia and I believe Louisiana). There is no reason to think that the same people won't try to make data conform to their reality, or bury the data. This is the same group of people who talk about vaccines don't work, after all.
Donald and the Federalist Society have done everything they can to rig the Federal Judiciary. So, why wouldn't he try that with the rest of the federal government.
Donald and MAGA won't keep their campaign promises and will blame the Democrats (specifically, Biden and Nancy Pelosi) for things not working out. Now, I know that Biden will be out of office in a week and a half and Pelosi no longer has a post of great power. But watch. That is what Donald will say and many of his MAGA followers will profess to believe him.
Thanks to the Good Professor for his cogent comments.
I keep thinking that if he’s going to rid government of experts/expertise, he’ll have free rein to make up whatever data supports his claims. Or maybe the loyalists will be unable to understand the data and write “reports” like AG Barr’s so-called summary of the Moeller report.
I worked in government for 30+ years. Fifteen years ago a nonprofit was strongly opposed to a policy that was quickly moving people from homelessness to housing. The data showed the policy was working to actually reduce homelessness. So the nonprofit defined a new population and added it to the data. Voila, homelessness was increasing. It sometimes takes very little to skew the data and those numbers can be given much more visibility. Just sayin’.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. I was suggesting that trump’s new Loyalty Service would be clever enough or dumb enough to release misinformation or disinformation “reports” to the public. Like Barr, who took real facts and twisted them to mean the opposite. No charity intended for Barr.
The problem with relying on liars, useful idiots, madmen, and charlatans to secure a win is... using liars, useful idiots, madmen, and charlatans. Trump lied his way through two elections and one term in office and won twice. We have history to look back on in order to look forward. It would be foolish to assume anything that doesn't align with the past or present.
The real problem, this time, is the state of our media. Between the growth of the right wing media machine since Trump's first term, the new alignment of oligarch-owned newspapers like WaPo and LA Times with Trump, and the upheaval that is now going on in broadcast TV and cable, our population is going to be left to their own devices in trying to figure out how things are really going. Add to that the nefarious turn social media ownership has taken, between Musk's Twitter and with Zuck basically going back on every half promise he made on live TV in multiple appearances in congressional hearings, and we are in deep trouble. Bluesky membership is still at just under 26 million users. That isn't nearly enough to create a real balance and keep people, especially young ones, informed. Just look at this statistic from CNN's Harry Enten, sourced from the NY Times:
It's gobsmacking to see that only 5% of registered voters carried with them the memory of January 6. Where were we all on that day? Where have we all been since?
Then, there is the access Trump will feel obligated to give DOGE charlatans Musk and Ramaswamy to sensitive government information that, who knows, those two will see fit to use and that Congress might authorize them to act on. One can only hope that the reports to the effect that Trump is growing tired of Musk staying at Mar-A-Lardo are true and that they will soon have some kind of falling out. Let's see how far Musk's investment of a quarter billion in Trump really goes.
Last time around, Trump's cabinet of industry shills was busy dismantling regulations that make our food and environment safe and keep our national lands in federal hands. Trump has nominated people to roles that are known to be more than willing to go a lot further this time around. How much of that will we be made aware of?
We should not only count on the worst, but we should be getting ready for what I expect to be a need for reconstruction once the nightmare is over.
Ronald Dworkin published a book entitled Justice for Hedgehogs before he passed away. He did a series of talks and lectures based on it. He saw, through the rise of the Tea Party at the time, what was coming and left us with the beginnings of a roadmap:
On the other side of the spectrum, what worries me most is the number of Democrats left in power who, foolishly, have come to the conclusion that the lesson from 2024 is that they need to obey in advance and cooperate with Trump.
We are in deep trouble and there's not a whole lot we can do about it for the next two years. What we can do is get ready for the midterm elections on the one hand, and focus most of our effort on planning for reconstruction after Trump.
I do not speak for my agency, and I do not work for BLS. But I sometimes am amazed at how much BLS can do with limited resources, And my chief concern for them or any statistical agency is for them to continue to do what they do in a climate of increasing difficulty in conducting the surveys driven by strong decreases in participation rates. You don’t have to posit any specific motivation by any party involved to be concerned about the continued accuracy of at least some of our most important statistics.
Brilliant as always. The irony of this is that the magats keep talking of building a wall to stop foreigners from coming in and taking their jobs but they cannot see that foreign ideas are coming in and taking their country. No wall to keep those out. Their whole ideology is based on ideas out of Russia, hungry, turkey and various banana republic regimes. Whatever was exceptional about America: our ideals, our constitution, our civics is long dead. We are now just a wobbling and messed up version of some 3rd world kleptocracy. Say Roman Empire circa 400 ad. When you allow foreign oligarchs like Musk and Ramy and Murdoch to rule you get a version of government they grew up admiring usually from their childhood. And that version has no resemblance the Jefferson, Madison or Lincoln. They are as dead as Julius Caesar and Cato.
No. Education is not the key. Large numbers of people aren't interesting in politics, history, science etc. You can't teach interest.
The low-information voters can mess things up. But the low information voters won't be fooled by fake statistics. They'll know things cost more. They'll know more people are unemployed. They'll know the climate is getting wonky. They can be fooled for a certain time, but not forever.
If we retain free and relatively fair elections we stand a chance of course corrections...domestically...eventually.
Thank you for this post! As a data analytics guy myself for over two decades, who has seen data being manipulated by even the best CEO's, I've been thinking a lot about this very thing in my own head this last few months (i.e., inflation protection is only as good as the REPORTED numbers...how reliable is or will be those reports). I'm glad to see that I'm not entirely crazy.
"OK, maybe Trump and those around him won’t try to meddle with the data, or American institutions will be strong enough to stop them if they try." Of course he will try. Academic labs and other institutions need to provide alternative sources of data that become more reliable. It is ironic. But the sole reliance on the government has this very flaw: A malicious and incompetent party can take control. Big government is not intrinsically bad or wrong, but it is intrinsically risky. And liberals with a good heart often do not realize they create a superstructure that can be used by the Joker. There is no American exceptionalism.
"Worse, I may be sounding like a Republican — because whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House, right-wing “inflation truthers” come out of the woodwork, claiming that official numbers are hiding the terrible reality of soaring prices."
This is one of the main purposes of Republican lies - to make the inverse truths seemjust as unreliable.
Here's another example: To even ask the question of whether Republicans are cheating in elections, let alone put serious resources into investigating it, makes you a tinfoil crackpot, because they lied about Democrats doing it so much the idea that anybody could ever be telling the truth about it seems absurd. Even with strong evidence, most non-political people wouldn't be able to see the difference between the fake accusations and the real ones.
(The real question is, is it POSSIBLE to cheat in elections, because if it is, of course they are, to whatever extent they can get away with.)
Back in the early 1970s I was among those predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union while confessing that I couldn’t pick a precise date for it. My focus was on how a centrally planned economy that ran on corrupted data submitted by enterprises seeking to guarantee annual bonuses in turn corrupted the utility of decisions made about the next economic plan. Eventually almost no one believed anything.
Trump might be able to fudge the numbers on reports that the average American never considers, but he won’t be able to make prices go down at the grocery store, the car lot, etc. Rents will be higher because he will loosen restrictions on price fixing. And the old folks relying on Social Security/Medicare are going to be looking for a nice new home under the bridge!
Right, but this post is more about inflation protection securities and how they may be slightly dangerous in an environment where the numbers get fudged (i.e., they won't be protective after all).
Like everone else I watched Trump make claims at his rallies and for kicks one day I just looked up the price of a dozen eggs he claimed was $9. At my local Wally World the price of a dozen Large Grade A Eggs is $4.53, half what Bankruptcy Bonespurs was claiming. Now I understand that P0S has most likely never once set foot into a grocery store, in his rally he seemed to have just descoveredd the word Grocery, none the less someone toold him how much eggs were and he took upon himself to lie about it to everyone that listens to him. I expect him to lie about everything for the next 4yrs or for however long it takes for his mind or heart to finnal give us all a break from the just shear ignorance or it all.
Trump 2.0 will cook the books for sure, heck maybe even convicted tax felon, and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg will oversee all of the new civil service appointments when Schedule F is used to eviscerate the civil service ranks.
>which he promised during the campaign would cut federal spending by $2 trillion a year by ***reading random tweets*** ferreting out waste<
I'm absolutely LOVING the uber-drollness of the post-Times Paul Krugman. LOL. Dr. Krugman, you totally could have a side hustle editing The Onion, or maybe as a staff writer for somebody like Colbert.
So true—or replace Colbert. I mean, just imagine the house band.
Great idea! And the band would be amazing.
Totally! Just love the humor when dealing with this awful, awful, depressing reality.
"Were you surprised to learn that Musk’s obviously fraudulent venture was a fraud? If so, you really shouldn’t be allowed to operate heavy machinery." Ha, ha, wild and wacky.
So true. I am actually feeling regret for having to "settle" for only all those great columns for all those years
Is this damning with faint praise, or praising with faint damns? I'm having some trouble with the distinction today, but it doesn't matter.
I posted a TikTok saying this exact same thing a few weeks ago and even mentioned the Bureau of Labor Statistics as a likely target. It was taken down as misinformation. 🤣
The first Trump administration already tried this with Covid deaths. It seems self evident they will try it with other data providing agencies.
And don’t forget the infamous Sharpie incident where he rerouted a hurricane!
I've been thinking of that book, "Persopolis" about life in Iran. Sadly I exect that someone will be writing a similar book about life in the USA during the Trump regime. I hope there's enough evidence that elections in 2026 slam the brakes on.
Watch Asif Kapadia's film '2073'
They usually do. We should expect the usual chaos and incompetence out of the Trump Whitehouse. It may open a few eyes.
What’s crazy is Trump believes his first term was a failure but his supporters believe he was successful. Bessent’s 3 x 3% means he believes Obama’s 2014-2016 was more successful than Trump first 3 years. Krugman should write about how Obama actually achieved Bessent’s goals while Trump did not because of his tax cuts. So basically had Trump just played golf and not signed Ryan’s tax cuts then he would have achieved 3 x 3%.
I hadn't. I was just thinking of it when I read the article. What it says to me is that for Trump, words are the thing and the thing is not the thing. He is living in a la-la land of talky-talky-talky where we can say whatever we want and if it is a properly constructed adjective-noun-verb sentence, it should be accepted as the way of the world. (This is a different approach to the Bush's who often got facts right, but had trouble with the words things. Should we demand more of our leaders? Nah.) I would like nothing more than some reality to intrude inconveniently in his life before he causes it to intrude in ours, but I expect the white house will be insulated against such things if they can at all manage it. Fortunately, when the deplorables become upset, I expect he will listen. It may take them a while to get around to root cause though, so we'll have to blame the immigrants, Jewish space lasers, and whatever else we can imagine first. It is depressing.
We voted to go through some things.
We will go through some things.
Hopefully it will build character. It seems in short supply.
The BLS is a necessary resource for small business owners to justify the amount of their self-paid wages to the IRS under a S-Corp. It can also be helpful for employees who mistakenly think they are underpaid. (Hey! We are all underpaid.) I don't see this as positive for business owners.
Safe to assume he will. Several states are already burying data on things like maternal and infant mortality rates (Texas, Georgia and I believe Louisiana). There is no reason to think that the same people won't try to make data conform to their reality, or bury the data. This is the same group of people who talk about vaccines don't work, after all.
Please let bird flu infect them.
Donald and the Federalist Society have done everything they can to rig the Federal Judiciary. So, why wouldn't he try that with the rest of the federal government.
Donald and MAGA won't keep their campaign promises and will blame the Democrats (specifically, Biden and Nancy Pelosi) for things not working out. Now, I know that Biden will be out of office in a week and a half and Pelosi no longer has a post of great power. But watch. That is what Donald will say and many of his MAGA followers will profess to believe him.
Thanks to the Good Professor for his cogent comments.
I keep thinking that if he’s going to rid government of experts/expertise, he’ll have free rein to make up whatever data supports his claims. Or maybe the loyalists will be unable to understand the data and write “reports” like AG Barr’s so-called summary of the Moeller report.
I worked in government for 30+ years. Fifteen years ago a nonprofit was strongly opposed to a policy that was quickly moving people from homelessness to housing. The data showed the policy was working to actually reduce homelessness. So the nonprofit defined a new population and added it to the data. Voila, homelessness was increasing. It sometimes takes very little to skew the data and those numbers can be given much more visibility. Just sayin’.
OT, and I can't claim to have studied the matter enough to pontificate on it - but isn't this a little too charitable to the infamous Barr?
Just asking, as they say,
Maybe I wasn’t clear. I was suggesting that trump’s new Loyalty Service would be clever enough or dumb enough to release misinformation or disinformation “reports” to the public. Like Barr, who took real facts and twisted them to mean the opposite. No charity intended for Barr.
The problem with relying on liars, useful idiots, madmen, and charlatans to secure a win is... using liars, useful idiots, madmen, and charlatans. Trump lied his way through two elections and one term in office and won twice. We have history to look back on in order to look forward. It would be foolish to assume anything that doesn't align with the past or present.
The real problem, this time, is the state of our media. Between the growth of the right wing media machine since Trump's first term, the new alignment of oligarch-owned newspapers like WaPo and LA Times with Trump, and the upheaval that is now going on in broadcast TV and cable, our population is going to be left to their own devices in trying to figure out how things are really going. Add to that the nefarious turn social media ownership has taken, between Musk's Twitter and with Zuck basically going back on every half promise he made on live TV in multiple appearances in congressional hearings, and we are in deep trouble. Bluesky membership is still at just under 26 million users. That isn't nearly enough to create a real balance and keep people, especially young ones, informed. Just look at this statistic from CNN's Harry Enten, sourced from the NY Times:
https://rimaregasblog42.substack.com/p/ill-be-gobsmacked
It's gobsmacking to see that only 5% of registered voters carried with them the memory of January 6. Where were we all on that day? Where have we all been since?
Then, there is the access Trump will feel obligated to give DOGE charlatans Musk and Ramaswamy to sensitive government information that, who knows, those two will see fit to use and that Congress might authorize them to act on. One can only hope that the reports to the effect that Trump is growing tired of Musk staying at Mar-A-Lardo are true and that they will soon have some kind of falling out. Let's see how far Musk's investment of a quarter billion in Trump really goes.
Last time around, Trump's cabinet of industry shills was busy dismantling regulations that make our food and environment safe and keep our national lands in federal hands. Trump has nominated people to roles that are known to be more than willing to go a lot further this time around. How much of that will we be made aware of?
We should not only count on the worst, but we should be getting ready for what I expect to be a need for reconstruction once the nightmare is over.
Ronald Dworkin published a book entitled Justice for Hedgehogs before he passed away. He did a series of talks and lectures based on it. He saw, through the rise of the Tea Party at the time, what was coming and left us with the beginnings of a roadmap:
Short video of Dworkin and the Tea Party
https://rimaregasblog42.substack.com/p/ronald-dworkin-theory-of-equality-philosophy-on-blog42?r=bfvi
https://rimaregasblog42.substack.com/p/from-milton-friedman-to-ronald-dworkin-economics-for-hedgehogs-socialethics-on-blog42
On the other side of the spectrum, what worries me most is the number of Democrats left in power who, foolishly, have come to the conclusion that the lesson from 2024 is that they need to obey in advance and cooperate with Trump.
We are in deep trouble and there's not a whole lot we can do about it for the next two years. What we can do is get ready for the midterm elections on the one hand, and focus most of our effort on planning for reconstruction after Trump.
I do not speak for my agency, and I do not work for BLS. But I sometimes am amazed at how much BLS can do with limited resources, And my chief concern for them or any statistical agency is for them to continue to do what they do in a climate of increasing difficulty in conducting the surveys driven by strong decreases in participation rates. You don’t have to posit any specific motivation by any party involved to be concerned about the continued accuracy of at least some of our most important statistics.
No fear of this at all Professor….
“I know that this may sound as if I’m getting into tinfoil-hat territory. Worse, I may be sounding like a Republican”
Yeah, as long as the Perfesser doesn't WALK like a Republican...
Brilliant as always. The irony of this is that the magats keep talking of building a wall to stop foreigners from coming in and taking their jobs but they cannot see that foreign ideas are coming in and taking their country. No wall to keep those out. Their whole ideology is based on ideas out of Russia, hungry, turkey and various banana republic regimes. Whatever was exceptional about America: our ideals, our constitution, our civics is long dead. We are now just a wobbling and messed up version of some 3rd world kleptocracy. Say Roman Empire circa 400 ad. When you allow foreign oligarchs like Musk and Ramy and Murdoch to rule you get a version of government they grew up admiring usually from their childhood. And that version has no resemblance the Jefferson, Madison or Lincoln. They are as dead as Julius Caesar and Cato.
No. Education is not the key. Large numbers of people aren't interesting in politics, history, science etc. You can't teach interest.
The low-information voters can mess things up. But the low information voters won't be fooled by fake statistics. They'll know things cost more. They'll know more people are unemployed. They'll know the climate is getting wonky. They can be fooled for a certain time, but not forever.
If we retain free and relatively fair elections we stand a chance of course corrections...domestically...eventually.
Thank you for this post! As a data analytics guy myself for over two decades, who has seen data being manipulated by even the best CEO's, I've been thinking a lot about this very thing in my own head this last few months (i.e., inflation protection is only as good as the REPORTED numbers...how reliable is or will be those reports). I'm glad to see that I'm not entirely crazy.
"OK, maybe Trump and those around him won’t try to meddle with the data, or American institutions will be strong enough to stop them if they try." Of course he will try. Academic labs and other institutions need to provide alternative sources of data that become more reliable. It is ironic. But the sole reliance on the government has this very flaw: A malicious and incompetent party can take control. Big government is not intrinsically bad or wrong, but it is intrinsically risky. And liberals with a good heart often do not realize they create a superstructure that can be used by the Joker. There is no American exceptionalism.
"Worse, I may be sounding like a Republican — because whenever there’s a Democrat in the White House, right-wing “inflation truthers” come out of the woodwork, claiming that official numbers are hiding the terrible reality of soaring prices."
This is one of the main purposes of Republican lies - to make the inverse truths seemjust as unreliable.
Here's another example: To even ask the question of whether Republicans are cheating in elections, let alone put serious resources into investigating it, makes you a tinfoil crackpot, because they lied about Democrats doing it so much the idea that anybody could ever be telling the truth about it seems absurd. Even with strong evidence, most non-political people wouldn't be able to see the difference between the fake accusations and the real ones.
(The real question is, is it POSSIBLE to cheat in elections, because if it is, of course they are, to whatever extent they can get away with.)
Back in the early 1970s I was among those predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union while confessing that I couldn’t pick a precise date for it. My focus was on how a centrally planned economy that ran on corrupted data submitted by enterprises seeking to guarantee annual bonuses in turn corrupted the utility of decisions made about the next economic plan. Eventually almost no one believed anything.
Trump might be able to fudge the numbers on reports that the average American never considers, but he won’t be able to make prices go down at the grocery store, the car lot, etc. Rents will be higher because he will loosen restrictions on price fixing. And the old folks relying on Social Security/Medicare are going to be looking for a nice new home under the bridge!
It’ll be a Brave New World (aka “Adventures in Homelessness “).
Right, but this post is more about inflation protection securities and how they may be slightly dangerous in an environment where the numbers get fudged (i.e., they won't be protective after all).
What about statistician blues! https://youtu.be/IUK6zjtUj00?si=njD-pS3qcpdXR7jv
Love this!
Good one!
Like everone else I watched Trump make claims at his rallies and for kicks one day I just looked up the price of a dozen eggs he claimed was $9. At my local Wally World the price of a dozen Large Grade A Eggs is $4.53, half what Bankruptcy Bonespurs was claiming. Now I understand that P0S has most likely never once set foot into a grocery store, in his rally he seemed to have just descoveredd the word Grocery, none the less someone toold him how much eggs were and he took upon himself to lie about it to everyone that listens to him. I expect him to lie about everything for the next 4yrs or for however long it takes for his mind or heart to finnal give us all a break from the just shear ignorance or it all.
Don’t forget his bit about Tic Tacs. That was golden, lol.
Yes it was.
Eggs are a terrible measure. Bird flu has been decimating chicken flocks. Less chickens higher egg prices.
Trump 2.0 will cook the books for sure, heck maybe even convicted tax felon, and former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg will oversee all of the new civil service appointments when Schedule F is used to eviscerate the civil service ranks.