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Comment by ortusdux | Hacker News Reader

The worst part of this report is my diminished faith in the numbers.

Could you explain? What about this report pushes you toward not believing the numbers?

It’s not this report specifically but the other stuff the admin has done with the BLS.

It's unfortunately not limited to the current administration. We've had the government telling us to not trust our lying eyes about inflation at least since the Biden administration. At the time government officials were reassuring everyone that there wasn't inflation while everyone could see the prices going up everywhere.

BLS was not gutted then.

I have no love for Biden. I didn’t vote for him/kamala in the last election.

However I can also recognize that these two are not the same situation.

Not so much THIS report, but you can't trust any data that the Trump administration puts out after all the blantant corruption. Remember the Sharpie on the hurricane chart?

It's more the messenger than the message. Or in this case the people funding and staffing the messenger, and who desperately need this number to be as low as possible.

The current administration fires people leading BLS when it reports numbers they don't like, regardless of the merit of the numbers.

In an age when one opponent says "the economy is great!" and the other "the economy is doing terrible!", I just tune out and keep my own thoughts.

This kind of deliberate both-sides-ist ignorance is PRECISELY why those arguments work. You aren't being smart, you are giving your overlords permission to lie to you.

These are tractable (if complicated) questions with real (if imprecise and inevitably debatable) conclusions. Ignoring them because you don't like argument and are confused by the talking heads on the news is, to be blunt, destroying society.

You misunderstand. I shut my ears to their propaganda, not my eyes to real research and verified information. Then, I talk this way or that to friends/family, and vote accordingly.

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