The federal government released official jobs for October on Friday – and President Donald Trump more than doubled them in a subsequent boast on Twitter.
Experts were scratching their heads at the president's creative metrics, and Trump was quickly blasted online for his "obscure math" and "Trump University economics." One economist said that the numbers boiled "were not tied to any empirical reality."
The Trump administration's own workforce reported that 1
But the numbers were not good enough for Trump. So he tweeted that the nation added a "blowout" 303,000 jobs. (Daughter Ivanka Trump stuck with the official 128,000 figure in her own tweet.)
The White House later explained inflated math. It arbitrarily inflated the figures with 60,000 jobs that officials claimed were lost directly or indirectly to the General Motors strike. So, for good measure, it added to job adjustments from previous months (though, didn't pull any downgrades from previous months). It also added to 20,000 temporary staff censuses who no longer work.
"The statement makes little sense and is not related to any empirical reality," Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at the international accounting conglomerate RSM, told Politico.
"The financial media should prepare for much more gas lighting on employment data next year when the Census Bureau is hiring more than 500,000 to carry out the ten-year census," Brusuelas warned. "Economists, like me, will always interpret the top line change in employment except census, but given what I observed today, I don't expect it out of the White House."
Trump got some major blowback on Twitter, including from Chris Lu, a Vice Secretary of Labor under former President Barack Obama.
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