Cooking the Inflation and Jobs Numbers

[justaprogressive]

Trump’s appointment of a hack loyalist, E.J. Antoni of the Heritage Foundation, to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics could actually lead to some interesting debates if Trump’s goal were not to rig the data. The BLS derives the Consumer Price Index by sampling tens of thousands of actual prices in different parts of the country, and then weighting them to create a “market basket” of typical consumer purchases. To calculate the unemployment rate, the BLS conducts two different surveys, one of households and the other of employers.

Antoni has objected that the BLS often issues major revisions after the initial CPI numbers, because some sources are slower to report than others. Likewise jobs numbers. He recently called for the BLS to issue its own reports quarterly rather than monthly.

More mainstream critics than Antoni have pointed out that the BLS methodology is outmoded in an era when large retailers keep all of their prices on computers updated minute to minute. MIT economists Alberto Cavallo and Roberto Rigobon have created a “Billion Prices Project,” which scrapes daily online pricing data from retailers to compute real-time inflation. Many other economists have also noted that the employer survey on jobs sometimes contradicts the household survey.

The problem, however, is that Trump did not appoint Antoni to make technical refinements for the sake of better data. He appointed him to cook the numbers. And both things are not possible.

The consumer price numbers that BLS released this week were pretty mixed. The July increase was only 0.2 percent, down from the June rate of 0.3 percent. But core inflation, less food and energy, rose at a 3.1 percent annual rate, which is above the previous several months.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-08-13-cooking-inflation-jobs-numbers-trump-bls/]

[Wiz Imp]

1. The author of this article ruins his own credibility by getting simple facts wrong.

To calculate the unemployment rate, the BLS conducts two different surveys, one of households and the other of employers.

The employer survey has nothing to do with the unemployment rate. The unemployment rate is calculated from a single survey.

He recently called for the BLS to issue its own reports quarterly rather than monthly.

BLS has ALWAYS released job data quarterly(from the QCEW program - a universe count from UI Records). Antoni did not call for a change to that. He called for STOPPING the monthly ESTIMATES from the CES Program.

economists have also noted that the employer survey on jobs sometimes contradicts the household survey.

The employer survey and and household surveys MEASURE DIFFERENT THINGS. They don't technically contradict each other because they are not measuring the same thing.

[justaprogressive]

2. Very Interesting indeed.

Because unemployment insurance records relate only to people who have applied for such benefits, and since it is impractical to count every unemployed person each month, the government conducts a monthly survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS) to measure the extent of unemployment in the country. The CPS has been conducted in the United States every month since 1940, when it began as a Work Projects Administration program. In 1942, the U.S. Census Bureau took over responsibility for the CPS. The survey has been expanded and modified several times since then. In 1994, for instance, the CPS underwent a major redesign in order to computerize the interview process as well as to obtain more comprehensive and relevant information.

There are about 60,000 eligible households in the sample for this survey. This translates into approximately 110,000 individuals each month, a large sample compared to public opinion surveys, which usually cover fewer than 2,000 people. The CPS sample is selected so as to be representative of the entire population of the United States. In order to select the sample, all of the counties and independent cities in the country first are grouped into approximately 2,000 geographic areas (sampling units). The Census Bureau then designs and selects a sample of about 800 of these geographic areas to represent each state and the District of Columbia. The sample is a state-based design and reflects urban and rural areas, different types of industrial and farming areas, and the major geographic divisions of each state.

Every month, one-fourth of the households in the sample are changed, so that no household is interviewed for more than 4 consecutive months. After a household is interviewed for 4 consecutive months, it leaves the sample for 8 months, and then is again interviewed for the same 4 calendar months a year later, before leaving the sample for good. As a result, approximately 75 percent of the sample remains the same from month to month and 50 percent remains the same from year to year. This procedure strengthens the reliability of estimates of month-to-month and year-to-year change in the data.

Each month, highly trained and experienced Census Bureau employees contact the 60,000 eligible sample households and ask about the labor force activities (jobholding and job seeking) or non-labor force status of the members of these households during the survey reference week (usually the week that includes the 12th of the month). These are live interviews conducted either in person or over the phone. During the first interview of a household, the Census Bureau interviewer prepares a roster of the household members, including key personal characteristics such as age, sex, race, Hispanic ethnicity, marital status, educational attainment, veteran status, and so on. The information is collected using a computerized questionnaire.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm