Trump Tries to Hide it....

0:00Ben Meiselas:This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way. Because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai slash Spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai slash Spotify. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile with your summer price forecast. Now, unfortunately, we're seeing rising costs across the country with possibility that big wireless hates you 100%. Now, over here at Mint Mobile, we're seeing sunny skies and dropping prices.

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1:53Ben Meiselas:Products not available in every state. Insurance is entering a new era. Policyholders expect a fast and flexible experience from the insurers they trust. That's why modern insurers run on Adyen. From effortless premium collections to instant claims payouts, Adyen's single platform automates your entire policy lifecycle. A single platform to reduce churn and claims fraud. Drive revenue. Stay in control of how your money moves. Adyen, fintech built for your next move. We're getting a lot of data these days. and with all the stuff that the Trump regime is doing, a lot of the data looks grim. And whether we're looking at consumer expectations, whether we're looking at interest rates, whether we're looking at the price of gas, whether we're looking at labor statistics, whether we're looking at inflation statistics, you know, you name it, they come from a variety of sources.

2:51Ben Meiselas:Some come come from within the government. Some come from outside of the government. There are consumer surveys that are done by universities. There are statistics that come from a Bureau of Labor statistics that are published here. I think sadly, they all tell a very grim story of where things can be headed at a high level. I mean, you can find certain areas and say, well, consumer expectations low, but consumers are still spending. And you can say, you know, you can look at these numbers and with the complexity that they are. But I think one of the issues is we know that Donald Trump has spent his entire life lying about numbers.

3:36Ben Meiselas:We know he's done that. He had a civil case where we saw he inflates and deflates, depending on how it suits him in very egregious ways. You know, he'll say$21 trillion. He'll just make up numbers. I brought in$21 trillion. And it's like none of that makes any sense. You know, we, especially when you look at the budget, the budget deficit increasing, the debt increasing to over$40 trillion. And so the one concern that I think we need to be thinking about, and we've been talking about this a lot, is the numbers coming out of the government bureau of labor statistics um and coming from other agencies can we rely on them still um are they under threat and as we get into territory where the numbers that are being reported are looking not great it's an understatement um is there going to be an impulse by an impulsive liar in Donald Trump to fully infect the apparatus within the government and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and other economic data that's coming up.

4:52Ben Meiselas:I want to bring in Justin Wolfer's chief economist of the Midas Touch Network. He is the founder and runs his own YouTube channel at Platypus Economics. So make sure you all check that out. And so, Justin, there's been a few red flags that I've just seen. I'll call them red flags, which have been efforts to politicize some of the data and rule changes that seem geared towards changing the formula and left to his own vices. I think Trump would tried to do that the way the economic data has been produced has created a lot of fortifications around it to try to avoid the type of intrusion but there have been a lot of red flags that are worrying me but you're close to this data you teach this data you rely on this data you'll be able to see if things are so different than what and compare them private to public.

5:57Ben Meiselas:So talk to us. Are there concerns? Where is this heading? What are you seeing, Justin? Yeah, thanks for the question, Ben. And I might be the only bloke on earth who is so excited to talk about data that I love the question. I love you coming to me on this. Look, the president has pretty much tried to invent a post-truth society. that he lies with such frequency that if we lose track of the truth, we lose our bearings. We don't know who we are. We don't know where we are. We don't know what our social problems are. And if they exist, but we can't measure it, then we can't solve them. So the first thing I want to say, Ben, is don't let the bastards beat us.

6:40Having said that, let me try and explain what's going on because it's a little tricky. okay so here's first of all the good news we have official statistical agencies in the united states they come with three letter acronyms they're the bureau of labor statistics the bureau of economic analysis the census bureau these are independent agencies who were told go ahead and measure the truth and report it fearlessly and they have some degree of protection now when i say they're independent this is the point where ben the lawyer is going to remind me i thought so was the Department of Justice, and that has become the personal vengeance arm of the president.

7:18So there are large swathes of the federal government that have given up their independence so far. Okay. So the good news is so far, those official government statistics have been entirely free from political interference. Side note, you notice I didn't say accurate, because no statistics ever accurate. They're all estimates. We never know everything that's going on unless we can measure every aspect of people's lives. So there's always statistical noise. So what they are is honest, high quality, sophisticated estimates. That's the right word to use for them. But they're also better than anyone else's estimate.

8:01That's why I trust them. Now, Now, let me give a history lesson. It used to be before President Trump that more or less when a president or a cabinet secretary said something out loud, a statistic, it was true. They would literally send it over to their nerds in another building to have them put a little checkmark next to every fact that was in the speech. It was true, but it might be cherry picked. It might be a convenient number. So when politicians spoke, they told the truth, even if it wasn't fully representative. Trump has done away with that norm. Trump makes up numbers willy-nilly. So the guide for citizens, and that's the important part here, is the guide for folks at home is anything that comes out of anyone who is a political appointee, who is at the White House or is a cabinet secretary, they are lying with such frequency they don't deserve the presumption they're telling the truth.

8:54Anything that's – then I normally, until a couple of weeks ago, I could then say anything that comes out of an official statistical agency is an honest, serious, high-quality estimate of the truth. Now I need to put the really big asterisk here, and this is why you were very careful, Ben, to use the word red flags. A couple of weeks ago, the Census put out a report that's unlike any that it's ever put out before. This was a report that didn't come out in an existing series number, that didn't have an author, and didn't thank anyone who reviewed it. Not surprisingly, it was a report about the 2020 election, which the president is obsessed by.

9:33The president is obsessed by furthering mistruths about it. It's subsequently come out, that report, which came out with the Census Bureau logo, but not the usual things like who the authors were, was actually authored by outside partisans that were brought into the Census Bureau. Normally that could never happen because the Census Bureau director is meant to be independent and also highly qualified. Well, they don't currently have a director, so the acting director is a Trump political appointee who brought in clowns to be clown an institution that has prided itself on telling the truth decade after decade after decade.

10:14There was a huge red flag. It turns out, and I did a whole video about this, it turns out that the claims that they made, they made claims that tens of thousands of immigrants who were not citizens voted and voted illegally. It's very easy to show that they showed no such thing. That, in fact, the methods they used were so flawed that even if no fraudulent voting occurred, their methods would show tens of thousands of people fraudulently voted. You can look that up if you, we can post a link or something. But so this was the first time in our lifetime that one of the official government agencies became an arm of government propaganda.

10:56Now, I want to defend the good people who work inside the Census Bureau. Every day, they're putting out all sorts of numbers that are not propaganda. What happened was the first one. Think of this as the canary in the coal mine. And then let me tell you about the big stink that followed. The Commerce Department that owns the Census Bureau, it used to have internal rules, a directive that said inappropriate political interference in statistics is not okay. It's banned. You're not allowed to do it. Howard Lutnick changed that directive, literally took out the rule that said inappropriate influence is not allowed, which means under Howard Lutnick, inappropriate influence is now, according to Howard Lutnick, appropriate.

11:43As far as I can tell, that hasn't led to a flood of bullshit. But what they've done is they've removed the scaffolding. They've removed the dam wall. It's now legal for folks to push the Census Bureau to start putting out propaganda. The Bureau's only done it once. It was completely obvious. I screamed it from the rooftops when it happened. This is a very dangerous road to walk down. Regimes that don't want citizens to know the truth, Russia, Venezuela, Argentina, Greece, this is a set of, this is a club that we don't want to be members of. And Howard Lutnick just changed the rules so that we could join that club.

12:34What do we do?

12:37Ben Meiselas:far out Ben I look pissed off don't I yeah I mean look this is your wheel I mean you you rely on these numbers as a professor you teach these numbers you know the people who do great work you probably taught people who go into this for a living and so and and and so these people learn from you or disciples of you. And now you have, you know, this made up MAGA math, that's all lies trying to intrude on something that you've devoted your life to. You're absolutely right. And by the way, you did a spectacular job making me sound boring, but that's okay because I live in the boring world of facts and I am comfortable with that.

13:19I love that. I invite everyone to join me. So what do we do? Let me give the very simplest answer. It is very easy for folks who are upset about the state of the world and folks who are upset about a regime that denies the very idea of truth to find it comfortable to join them. I say don't. That is a very dangerous thing to do. I promise you, I'm going to look you in the eye right now, I will come on Ben's camera any day of the week, if something bad happens, I will be the first to tell you. I will yell it from the treetops. Ben's right. Former students, friends, colleagues are on the inside. They're the ones doing it.

14:00That's why I don't want to muddy their good work. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of very, very serious statisticians devoting their life so that you and I understand the truth, that we know what gross domestic product is, what the unemployment rate is, what the inflation rate And at the moment, those statistics are all accurate. I will scream blue murder if they're not. So the first thing I want to say is don't let the bastards win. The facts are there. Accept the facts and think about what they mean and think about how we can use them to design a better world. That's the first thing. Secondly, at the very first moment we can, we have to put in place even stronger safeguards to make sure, Ben, this is your area of expertise, that the Department of Justice is about justice, not vengeance, that the Bureau of Census is about the census, not propaganda, that Labor statistics reflect what happens in the Labor market rather than the fever dreams of an aging president with a weak connection to reality.

15:06So that's the job of the next Congress. It's the job of the next president. It's our jobs to make sure they get there. But along the way, let's stay rooted in reality.

15:16Ben Meiselas:We'll leave it there. Justin Wolfers runs Platypus Economics. It's his YouTube channel. Search Platypus Economics. Watch his videos. Tell him Ben sent you and Ben says hello. We also are fortunate to have Justin as the chief economist at Midas Touch. And we've been able to bring you every weekend at least two videos of me and Justin going over these types of topics. So, Justin, appreciate you. And I want your folks to know how hard you work, Ben. You are go, go, go. And so I'm going to say thank you, sir. Thank you. Thanks to all the Midas Mighty out there who are watching. Have a good one, everyone.

15:52Ben Meiselas:Before you go, our book, WTF America, is available for pre-order now. It's the story of how we got here and how we fight our way back. To pre-order, scan the QR code or click the link in the description. Let's do this.

16:11Thank you.