There are some fact checks so embarrassing that sometimes, I cannot believe they must be written. This is one of them.
No, contrary to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman’s conspiracy theory, there is absolutely zero chance that President Trump or his minions manipulated the May jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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
Once, while talking to a friend who works at the BLS, I joked that he should offer me a sneak peek of next month’s report. I was obviously kidding, in the way that all reporters kid when there’s even an iota of a chance they could get a scoop — except that apparently, this was no joke.
I knew security at the BLS was high, but as it turns out, leaking or tampering with any BLS data can bring about criminal charges. The jobs report itself is kept under the highest security to prevent leaks that could enable insider trading. Furthermore, most officials at the BLS are career bureaucrats who serve across administrations. Partisanship is left at the door.
Of course, Krugman knows all this. That didn’t stop him from trying to cast doubt on a stunning jobs report showing that reopening America had abruptly slashed our unemployment rate by more than 1 point.
And all of this comes just one day after the New York Times decided that a senator’s op-ed arguing an opinion supported by 58% of the public was beyond the pale. Don’t expect Krugman’s bosses to reprimand him. As long as Trump’s the target, no conspiracy theory is too wacky.
