Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute , a nonpartisan, nonprofit think tank, noted in a blog post that “the law is designed to trigger a massive redistribution of income to the wealthy,” not to benefit the working class, as the Trump administration claims.
“The economy runs on reliable data,” said Economic Policy Institute President Heidi Shierholz, a former Labor Department economist who served in the administration of President Barack Obama. “Businesses use these numbers to decide whether to hire or expand. The Federal Reserve uses them to set interest rates. State and local governments use them to plan budgets. If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data – or suspect the data are being manipulated – confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible. It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded.”
Heidi Shierholz, the Labor Department’s chief economist from 2014 to early 2017 during President Barack Obama’s administration, said the charge from Trump “is outrageous and shows a total misunderstanding of how government statistical agencies work” to compile data, she said.
Heidi Shierholz, former chief economist of the Department of Labor and now the president of the Economic Policy Institute, told the Post that firing a nonpartisan analyst for merely reporting bad news was “straight out of an autocratic playbook.”
She told the Post, “If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data — or suspect the data are being manipulated — confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible. It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded.”
Trump, on the other hand, during his second term, inherited “unquestionably the strongest economy” in more than two decades, per the Economic Policy Institute, particularly because of the US economy’s rebound compared with peer nations.
For some analysts, the data suggests the economy is on the brink of a recession. “To me, today’s jobs report is what entering a recession looks like,” said Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute. “Could we pull up? Sure. But if we look back and end up dating an official recession that starts 3-6 months from now, this is what it would look like today – rapid softening/deterioration in the labor market.”
“Broad-based tariffs affirmatively shrink the tradeable goods sector of the economy (manufacturing), full stop,” says Josh Bivens, chief economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Tariffs make manufacturing goods (both import and domestic competitors) more expensive and so people buy fewer manufactured goods.”
“If policymakers and the public start to doubt the integrity of the numbers, confidence will collapse—creating chaos that will reduce business investment and consumer spending,” Heidi Shierholz, the president of the Economic Policy Institute, told BI.
Firing BLS chief is “economically dangerous,” former Labor Department chief economist says
President Donald Trump’s firing of a top Labor Department data official is both a danger to democracy and to the economy, Heidi Shierholz, who served as the agency’s chief economist in the Obama administration, said in a statement.
Shierholz, now president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, called Trump’s removal of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer because he didn’t like the July jobs report “a move straight of an autocratic playbook.”
But it also has serious consequences for the economy, which “runs on reliable data.”