() An economist aligned with President Donald Trump isn’t backing White House claims that monthly U.S. job numbers have been rigged against the Republican, but he says it’s high time for calculation methods to be revamped for better accuracy.
Stephen Moore joined the president Thursday for a news conference in which he helped tout the Trump administration’s economic policies and inserted himself into the controversy over the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump fired the head of BLS after accusing the bureaucrat of revising downward recent monthly job tallies to make him look bad, even though corrections have been a hallmark of the process.
Moore said he doesn’t see a political subtext but agrees BLS has produced inaccurate figures. He says the agency overestimated by 1.5 million the number of jobs created by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, in the Democrat’s last two years in office.
“We have to find new techniques to find out how many jobs were really created over the months,” Moore told “CUOMO” on Thursday evening. “Look, government policy, employment policy by businesses, all of this stuff is really affected. When we want to take a pulse of the economy, the most important number that comes out every month is the jobs number.”
He did not provide specifics but likened today’s outmoded methods of compiling job statistics with political pollsters who still rely on reaching out to voters through land lines when most people use cellphones.
“Response rates are much, much worse, and that’s why you get these kind of crazy results,” Moore said.
He said job statistics have gotten progressively worse over the last few presidential administrations.
Moore currently is a senior visiting fellow in economics at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He co-authored a 2018 book, “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.”
