Monday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said “would-be king” President Donald Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer as the commissioner of labor statistics was setting the United States’ credibility in data collection “on fire.”
Warren said, “Well, look, you know, you get bad data, you kill the messenger, right? And that’s Donald Trump because he thinks he can bend reality. If he can just tell a different story, then everyone will have to believe his story. I think most people have not absorbed just how dangerous it is, both to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and also, then what, to put in some sycophant who’s going to give data that makes the president happy? And when that happens, who believes the data? So he’s got some toady suck-up in there, and a month from now, let’s just say good data comes out. How many people have to discount that data and say, not really? Even if it’s bad data, how many people say, I wonder how much worse it might have been?”
She continued, “That’s the thing to remind everyone. The United States’ data collection and the economic range are the best in the world. We are the gold standard, and the importance of that is that every government official who’s making policy choices, and I mean that at the federal level, but also at the state level, at the town level, can look at here’s where we’ve been, here’s the direction it looks like the economy is going. Understand the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not interpret the data. They just report the numbers.”
Warren added, “Improve data collection, but don’t call it rigged because this is like taking value that the United States has literally spent decades and decades and decades building up, and Donald Trump just strikes a match and sets it on fire. He tells the entire world, don’t trust data coming out of the United States.”
She concluded, “This is, you know, the would-be king who thinks that he can destroy anyone and destroy their businesses.”
Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN
Read the full article here