> IMO, US might be on the same path albeit slower.

Hasn't the US been speed running this for the past six months?

Worth to point out that he then manages to lower the interest rates by force, and then, surprise, inflation skyrockets.

He will only look into to it if the results don't go his way.

What did they direct Apple, Google, and Amazon to do?

He has certainly angered a lot of the Miami folk I work around in the office. Latins here were very much pro-trump and now it seems they are just bitter about his presidency because of the the iran move, now supporting the ukraine war, these are viewed as an extension of the "swamp". i've even heard more than once that he is now "king of the swamp" from people who were generally favorable of him over anyone else(not nutjob magas, just didn't like kamala).

I didn't understand anyone voting for that in particular.

Policy questions of all sorts, we can all discuss: that's called democracy.

But when someone promises to end your participation, you have surrendered all agency to them which has never worked out well in history.

> That's the promise

[Citation needed]

[flagged]

If you're not worried the leading democracy in the world is looking for yes men, you should.

Trump specifically claimed that the numbers were rigged to make Republicans and him look bad. He of course offers no evidence for this.

That's very much like a USSR or North Korean way of doing things.

I think one of the reasons the USSR centrally planned economy failed was because they couldn’t get accurate data from satellite sources, meaning there was no chance to make good decisions.

It generally hasn't worked out great for anyone else, though. The obvious modern parallel is Turkey, where Erdogan, rather than dealing with bad numbers, just faked the numbers. And forced down interest rates. Today, Turkey's inflation rate is 35%, though in fairness that's a decent reduction from the nearly 100% it was seeing a couple years ago.

> Unless you believe operating like this what makes Russia or North Korea poorer than the USA, which I think is very dubious.

Rejecting people who look at reality with people who tell the leader what they want to hear is a big part of why Russia and North Korea are so less successful than the US, yeah. I don’t think that’s dubious, or even uncertain.

This is a statement of fact that you're referring to as propaganda.

It's complicated. I've lived in an eastern European communist country, escaped as a political refugee, and then lived in several western countries.

Communist countries at least could house everyone. They more or less had to, because most of them are too cold in winter for the homeless to survive. Education was generally free and quite good. Etc...

But... my dad was dragged off one day and beaten black and blue by the secret police for engaging in "anti-communist capitalist activities". He was tutoring students after school for a bit of cash.

Meanwhile, in the world's richest third-world country, the United States, people with the wrong skin colour are being dragged out of their homes and thrown into concentration camps in another country. Breaking a leg can bankrupt you.

You hear stories of NK refugees hating their new life in SK because it's too competitive and they can't keep up with the constant go-go-go business culture.

I also saw smuggled(!) videos of children in NK picking up individual grains of rice that fell in between the railway tracks at the local shunting yard. So you know... hustle culture, or that.

I personally remember driving to a shopping centre and standing in line outside right before it opened so my Mom could buy me rain boots. Her friend that worked there had called her at 6am telling her to hurry because they had them in stock for the first (and only) time that year.

But... on my recent holiday to the US I was shocked to see how tense police officers looked compared to anywhere else in the world. I witnessed a traffic accident, and the cops that turned up looked like they were ready to draw their weapons and start blasting at any second. They were all kitted out in body armour and had their hands on their weapons at all times. Scanning the crowd non-stop. Where I live, cops are friendly and will high-five my kid and pose for selfies. The US feels more like an outdoor prison to me.

So the first case was fine, no problem. But the firing and hypothetical retaliation by reversing the polarity of bias, is not fine?

Probably time to invest in the stock market then.

I think the worry here is that the rates were maintained higher for longer using bad data not some communist conspiracy theory.

HN leans a bit to the right due to it being mostly male and tech oriented, which tend to lean libertarian. If that isn’t enough of a safe space for you, your views might be a farther from center than you think

Ah yes, Woke Combinator, the indefatigably progressive bastion, where the innocent are gulagged and a stifling political agenda is imposed by stalinist VC apparatchiks.

This is definitely a valid perspective supported by fact

Thanks for that. https://archive.is/84YPk for folks without a Bloomberg subscription.

The jobs data comes from surveys of businesses and consumers. Fewer of each category are responding, continuing a long-term trend of declining response rates. Cuts affect their ability to collect data with about 15% of the sample "suspended" -- i.e. not done "to align survey workload with resource levels" in the words of the announcement linked from the Bloomberg article.

> "The more data you’re missing and comes in later, the higher the odds the revisions will be much larger," said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC. "Fifty percent is just not enough."

From a related article:

> BLS surveys firms in the payrolls survey over the course of three months, gaining a more complete picture as more businesses respond. But a smaller share of firms are responding to the first poll. Initial collection rates have repeatedly slid below 60% in recent months — down from the roughly 70% or more that was the norm before the pandemic.

> “The more data you’re missing and comes in later, the higher the odds the revisions will be much larger,” said Omair Sharif, president of Inflation Insights LLC. “Fifty percent is just not enough.”

[…]

> “We are seeing these cuts to funding for government agencies affect their ability to collect and analyze economic data,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “And for all of the reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is conducting, there is likely to be more volatility going forward.”

* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...

From William Beach, the Trump-appointed predecessor to the just-fired chief (and Heritage Foundation fellow):

> The totally groundless firing of Dr. Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS, sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau. For a full statement opposing this move, read: https://www.friendsofbls.org/updates/2025/8/1/statement-on-c...

* https://twitter.com/BeachWW453/status/1951376029060055506#m

Beach was on an April 2025 episode from Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast, "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":

> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfgpqVixeIw

* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-of-americas-most-...

* https://archive.is/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2...

Sure that's fine. It looked like we were getting a downturn of some sort this year no matter what the government did anyway just based off the debt term structure.

Don't fire people for reporting data though.