And sweet sorrow
King Arrested Development threw another tantrum after the bad jobs report issued on Friday revealed the fabulous Donald Trump economy for a big, fat lie. He summarily fired Erika McEntarfer, the Biden-appointed Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner.
George A. Akerlof, a Nobel-winning economist, asks New York Times readers what do we do with a newly minted dictator with all the emotional maturity of a 5-year-old. It’s a rhetorical question for which Akerlof offers observations without answers. For that matter, what do we do about half the population of a superpower that handed unchecked power to a toddler?
Akerlof is as concise as a balance sheet in recounting the events surrounding the report and McEntarfer’s ouster. What happens with the Bureau of Labor Statistics, he explains, may seem like inside baseball of importance only to economists, but it is not:
The credibility of American statistics is foundational. It undergirds investor trust. It guides fiscal and monetary policy. It tells businesses when to hire, when to expand and when to hold. When those numbers are tainted or appear to be, the ripple effects are vast. Markets can lose faith in the data and in the country that produces it.
It’s not simply markets that lose faith in this country when the 5-year-old throws over the board when he’s losing. The world does. The world has.
The deeper risk is cynicism, the quiet corrosion of faith in institutions. If we can’t believe the numbers, how do we believe anything?
Most children learn that flipping the board doesn’t make them the winner. It just means the game is over. In a democracy, the same lesson holds. We need our referees. We need our scorekeepers. And most of all, we need leaders who understand that losing the game fairly is far more honorable than winning by force.
Why so? Because when presidents flip the board, it’s not just a game that ends. It’s the pieces of democracy that get scattered to the floor.
Trump’s supporters and accomplices “know what he’s doing and they either don’t care or they like it.”
We face not only a gilded toddler working to end democracy, but a major political party and Supreme Court prepared to flip the board on his behalf. The GOP has rejected democracy. It is supported by a coalition of Silicon Valley billionaire-demigods who see no use for popular sovereignty, Christian nationalists who want to institute a white-dominated theocracy, and ultra rich financiers who see the rest of us as the kiddie table in the corner. If you don’t stop them, who will?
(This was accurate eight years ago.)
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