John Law (6:41)

Thanks, Isaac, and welcome, everybody. Took a couple extra days off for some travel I was doing, but it is good to be back with you. Here are your quick hits for today. First up, President Donald Trump said he would not deploy US Troops to Ukraine as part of any security agreement, but did not rule out the US Providing air support. Number two, White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt confirmed that the Trump administration is in talks with intel over taking over a 10% stake in the computer technology company. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick recently suggested that the deal could involve swapping existing government grants for intel shares. Number three, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked security clearances for 37 current and former national security officials, including some who were involved in the assessment of Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election and members of former President Joe Biden's National Security Council. Number four, Air Canada, announced an agreement with the union representing flight attendants for the airline, ending their strike. And number five, the Trump administration added over 400 product categories to be covered by its 50% tariff on steel and aluminum imports. The new levies went into effect on Monday.

Car Tracks Host (8:01)

To tell you about the president announced a little bit ago that he's going to nominate economist E.J. antony from the Heritage foundation to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics now. This comes after Donald Trump fired the last BLS commissioner earlier this month after the latest data showed that the job growth had been a lot weaker than previously reported. Trump claimed those numbers were, quote, rigged, but offered no proof to back that up. If Antoni does indeed get the job, he'll have to be confirmed by the Senate.

John Law (8:30)

In a social media Post Last Monday, August 11, President Donald Trump announced that he was nominating economist E.J. antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Earlier this month, Trump fired the previous commissioner, Erica McIntarfer, after the agency released a weaker than expected July jobs report and revised May's and June's numbers downwards. Antoni, who worked as chief economist at the Heritage foundation, has criticized the BLS reporting and said the agency must improve its processes for collecting and sharing economic data. The Senate must confirm Antony before he can take the position, but his confirmation hearing has not yet been scheduled. For context, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or the bls, is the agency within the Labor Department responsible for measuring market activity, working conditions, price changes and productivity in the US Economy. Every month, the bureau compiles an employment report from the monthly survey of about 631,000 work sites selected to represent all US employers. The initial numbers released by the BLS are based on partial data for the first portion of a month and then revised as data for more work sites and the rest of the month become available. Former commissioner McIntarfer worked for the federal government for 20 years before starting at the BLS in January 2024. Before his time with the Heritage Foundation, Antoni held two fellowships at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, a conservative advocacy group led by billionaire Steve Forbes, and served as an instructor at his alma mater, the University of Northern Illinois, while working toward a PhD economics. In recent years, Antoni has publicly criticized Social Security as a Ponzi scheme, referred to data from the BLS as phony baloney, and called for the Federal Reserve to be eliminated and for the US to return to the gold standard. Our economy is booming and EJ will ensure that the numbers released are honest and accurate, president Trump posted in his announcement on Truth Social. I know EJ Antony will do an incredible job in his new role. Congratulations. E.J. antony's nomination has sparked criticism from economists who say his confirmation would threaten the neutrality and reliability of the bls. In an interview with Fox Business after his nomination, Antoni suggested that the BLS should stop releasing its monthly jobs reports. The White House later said BLS would continue publishing the report each month. Separately, there is video footage showing Antoni leaving the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as others entered the building. The White House says that Antony was a bystander who wandered over to the Capitol and was in Washington, D.C. on business. E.J. antony is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner Jason Furman, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, posted on X. He is an extreme partisan and does not have any relevant expertise Today we'll get into what the left and the right are saying on Antony's appointment and then Isaac's tape.

Isaac Saul (11:18)

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John Law (13:42)

All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left opposes Antony's nomination, predicting his fealty to Trump will outweigh his commitment to accurate data. Some call Antony unqualified and say he poses a threat to the US Financial systems. Others say the appearance of politicization at BLS could do as much damage as manipulated numbers in the nation. Chris Lehman made the case against E.J. antony. Antony's only remote qualification for the job is a dogged commitment to the administration's fanciful interpretation of leading economic indicators and a demonstrably false story of tariffs and tax cuts working a miraculous across the board recovery from an economy that was left for dead by the Biden White House, lehman wrote. Unlike other commissioners of the bls, Antoni, the chief economist at the Heritage foundation, the think tank behind Project 2025, has no background in labor economics, and his social media forays into macroeconomic debates show vanishingly little knowledge there as well. Even before Trump's midSummer massacre at BLS, Antoni had been calling for the equally data challenged Department of Government Efficiency to take a chainsaw to the Bls in an Aug. 4 Fox News interview. He also suggested that the BLS should simply suspend the release of jobs numbers until they're subject to fuller vetting. Lehman said if something as important as the collection and publication of fact based assessments of real economic conditions were to fall completely under the sway of the administration's MAGA boosting narratives. It will place many Americans already living precariously at the mercy of whatever appeasement strategy hacks like Antonio adopt to appease the great leader. In the New Yorker, John Cassidy argued big business and Wall street need to stand up for honest data. In a public statement on Antony's nomination, the Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics called on the Senate to assess whether Antoni had the necessary qualifications, management experience, statistical experience, knowledge of the BLS and its products and and commitment to its mission of providing timely and accurate statistics, cassidy wrote. Looking at Antoni's record, the answer seems obvious. He obtained his PhD in economics in 2020. Since then, he has worked for conservative think tanks and defended Trump's policies. He has also openly derided the bls. The L is silent, he wrote on X last year. With the BLS facing challenges from all sides, the responsibility of protecting its mission and preserving its integrity seems likely to fall on Republican senators, whose track record on vetting Trump's appointments and restraining his authoritarian tendenc is woeful. But big corporations and Wall street firms that depend on the official data in their day to day operations should also be applying pressure to the White House and the Senate, cassidy said. In attacking the Federal Reserve and now the bls, Trump is undermining the institutional foundations on which business confidence, American financial dominance and the reserve status of the dollar are based. In the Atlantic, Egan Reich suggested the damage to the economic data may already be done. BLS data may not be completely tamper proof, but they're pretty close. The sharpest economic minds in this country, both inside and outside the bureau, pay meticulous attention to the deepest layers of the data, many strata below the headline unemployment rate and change in payroll employment. Deceiving them all would be very hard to do, reich wrote. Unfortunately, that might not matter. Antony doesn't have to manipulate any data to undermine the reliability of the government's economic statistics. That damage might already have been done. Perhaps Antony can mandate methodological deviations that bias the numbers in Trump's preferred direction, but I don't think he needs to. Confidence in the bureau is already badly weakened, reich said. This is about much more than just our trust as consumers of the jobs report because we are also its producers. To create its reports, the BLS needs businesses and citizens to take the time to respond to surveys about changes to their payroll and and about who is going to work or looking for a job in their household. Even before Trump won the election last November, the trend in survey responsiveness was declining, posing an existential threat to the robustness of the data. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying. Which brings us to what the right is saying. The right is mixed on Antoni's nomination, though some say his efforts to reform the BLS are worth undertaking. Some worry that Antoni lacks the qualifications for the role. Others say he could improve the bls, but only if he eschews partisanship. In the Daily Caller, Alfredo Ortiz argued Trump made the right call in picking EJ Antony. The BLS's credibility has eroded in recent years due to wildly off base economic estimates. Observe its announcement last August that it had overstated Biden administration job creation by nearly a million positions, resulting in Biden receiving positive jobs numbers headlines month after month that he didn't deserve, ortiz wrote. President Donald Trump was right to fire BLS Commissioner Erica McIntarfer, a Biden appointee, for these mistakes, even if they were the result of systemic flaws, not partisanship. Antoni, who Trump nominated as her replacement on Monday, can restore integrity and precision to our most critical economic data agency. Antoni was one of the first and most articulate critics of problematic post pandemic BLS data. His expertise and dedication to reform make him the ideal candidate to ensure Americans can once again trust what the numbers say, ortiz said. Critics claim Antoni is under credentialed for the position. The reality is that conservatives rarely climb the traditional academic ladder, not because of lack of skill or scholarship, but because universities, especially in the social sciences, overwhelmingly deny tenure to right leaning scholars. It's a vicious cycle. Conservatives are shut out of faculty jobs, which in turn means they don't accumulate the elite university credentials their detractors demand. In National Review, Dominic Pino Trump wants a Bureau of MAGA statistics. Antony is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump's policies on social media, and he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics. Whether that is due to willful misinterpretation or ignorance on Antoni's part is up for debate, but the pattern is undeniable, Pineau said. Maybe you could excuse these posts as rage bait for social media and point to Antoni's more serious work to prove his competence. But there isn't serious work to speak of. He hasn't published in any major economics journal. His claims to fame include being a frequent guest on talk radio shows. Antoni is nowhere near qualified to be BLS commissioner. If it was really true that Trump wanted to modernize and improve the bls, he would have nominated someone with deep experience in economic data collection who has published research on statistical methodology and has ideas on how to make the nuts and bolts of the BLS work better. His nomination of Antoni proves that he wants a lackey instead. In the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Bunn and Kyle Pomerlow explored what could happen if Antoni produces overly optimistic inflation numbers. Every statistical tool for measuring the economy has room for improvement, but the BLS's methodology is sound and its team ensures reliable estimates of price change when it has adjusted its methodology for measuring inflation. The BLS staff has always been transparent and thorough, bun and Pamerlo said. Will that be true? Under Mr. Antony, there are reasons for concern. He co authored a 2024 paper with Peter St. Ange for the Brownstone Institute that critiques the way government measures the cost of living. Messenger's Antonio and Saint Onge created an alternative measure of inflation and used it to claim that the US economy has been in recession. We hope that Mr. Antony approaches the job with deep respect for the value of consistent and defensible measures of the economy. If, as he has said, he is interested in improving those measures by boosting data collection efforts, that would be a valuable contribution, band Pamela said. But if he uses his role to develop alternative economic measures for political purposes, taxpayers will feel the effect. Workers may not feel the ebb and flow of monthly data reports, but they will notice higher tax bills if Mr. Trump, aided by the BLS, undersells inflation. All right, let's head over to Isaac for his take.

Isaac Saul (22:03)

Alright, that is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to my take. Sometimes making sense of the news is complicated. Sometimes it isn't. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not have a problem with partisanship. It has a problem with data collection. President Trump is not solving one problem, he is creating another. He does not want more accurate job numbers. He wants job numbers that look more favorable for him. Fortunately, very few writers and pundits outside the most loyal Trump sycophants are pretending otherwise. Even some of Antony's backers, like his friend and Washington examiner columnist Tiana Lo Dosher, conceded that the BLS is not fudging the numbers and couldn't get away with it even if it tried to. Dosher believes Antoni will improve the way BLS conducts its job surveys, and maybe he will. But she at least does not entertain the absurdity that the previous leaders of the BLS were working to undermine Trump. It's a small thing, but still heartening to see that our partisan lines haven't been drawn so definitively that pundits are incapable of agreeing on a common sense view. Economists want timely economic data in order to get that. The BLS surveys employers to create a preliminary monthly jobs report, which economists accept will be somewhat inaccurate in exchange for its timeliness. Because it's preliminary, the BLS then adjusts its report once it gets more data for a given month, and once a year it releases its most reliable report on its most reliable data sets, which are state unemployment records. Simply put, there is always a trade off between accuracy and timeliness with data analysis at the BLS's scale. For the most part, the BLS's system has served us well. Big revisions happen, but for a $30 trillion economy, they actually aren't as big as you would think. For decades, a good balance between reliable and timely labor statistics has allowed presidents, members of Congress, employers, banks and the Federal Reserve to pull certain levers to keep our economy humming. And as we sit here today, we still have the largest economy in the world, which has recovered faster than any of our peers from COVID putting us in a globally and historically strong position. Of course our data collection system can be improved, and in the post Covid world, it has been getting worse. Survey responses have been fizzling and statistical agencies are woefully underfunded, which a lot of people think is contributing to less reliable initial numbers. This is a frustration I myself have shared, and it is the reason a lot of Trump's defenders offered to justify his decision to fire a McIntarfer. It is also not the reason Trump gave. Trump fired McIntarfer because, as he said himself, he believes the jobs reports were rigged against Republicans. There is a simple way to measure whether or not Trump's allegation is true. When the jobs report gets revised, as they often do, how are they revised? Consistently downward revisions would mean rosy initial reports showing bias favoring the administration, and consistently upward revisions would imply the opposite. So are Democratic presidents getting more downward revisions than Republicans? No, they aren't. There's a lot of noise here, but the story is really simple. Trump fired the head of the BLS for releasing unfavorable jobs numbers, then hired someone to publish favorable numbers instead of. And despite some protestations from people like Dosher, who again is a friend of Antoni's, I agree with critics on the right and left that he is not qualified for the job. Even if you ignore the enormous partisan asterisks here, Antoni was a January 6th attendee and a Project 2025 contributor whose feed is a fire hose of the most sycophantic commentary imaginable. As Dominic Pino said in National Review, under what the Right Is Saying, quote, he does not understand economic statistics. Pino highlighted seven different posts from Antonio in just the last year that show a clear misunderstanding of basic economics. In one example, he said import prices just came in way below expectations. June was up just 0.1% month over month and down 0.2% year over year, while May saw a huge downward revision from flat to 0.4% month over month. Still waiting for tariffs to be passed on by foreign producers? Pino addressed this tweet like this quote the import price index does not include tariffs. If foreign producers were eating U.S. tariffs, they would need to cut their pre tariff prices so that the post tariff price doesn't rise. The graph that he shared shows the pre tariff prices on average stayed roughly the same between April and June, which means that foreign producers on average were passing the tariffs on to Americans. And there are more examples like this. You can find similar arguments in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute, the Dispatch, and Unherd, as well as from conservative economists at the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. William Beech, Trump's pick for BLS commissioner during his first term, even penned a letter questioning Antony's qualifications. As much as I oppose his nomination, it's perfectly possible that his nomination won't become the disaster I expect it to. Antony's initial ploy to stop releasing the monthly jobs report was shot down by the White House. As Dosher explains, he is going to have a hard time politicizing 2000 economists even if he wants to. Additionally, there are numerous ways to measure the health of our economy and job growth that don't involve the bls, ADP reports, indeed, job postings, independent business surveys, and even other reports from the Department of Labor, like unemployment insurance claims, just to name a few. I'm also skeptical of how long Antonio will last. This position is not a lifetime or even 10 year appointment. As Trump just demonstrated, a future Democratic president could fire Antony. And honestly, I don't think the business sector, which heavily influences the Senate and president, will tolerate fudge numbers or other kinds of chicanery if Antony goes that route. Still, the appointment will justifiably undermine trust in an agency responsible for crucial economic reports that the entire government and many private sector leaders rely on to make decisions. And we shouldn't delude ourselves into believing the BLS is being shaken up for any kind of thoughtful reason when the man responsible for this change has explained his motivations clearly, Trump wanted to punish McIntarfer for a correction that is part of her job and is rewarding Antoni for being loyal to him. His hope, obviously, is to get more politically favorable numbers from the bls, but thanks to his decision, the public will have to view those numbers with skepticism Foreign we'll be right back after this quick break.

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Car Tracks Host (29:15)

This is Car Tracks with Turtle Wax. Your car says a lot about you. So if we asked your car what it would say about you, what would it say? Listen, you dropped one of those tiny cheeseburgers under the seat like last week and now we're both dry heaving at the stench. Do us a favor, grab some Turtle Wax and let's get to work. This has been Car Tracks with Turtle Wax. You are how you car.

Isaac Saul (29:52)

All right, that is it for my take today. Which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from Dean in Carbondale, Illinois. Dean said, how do the Feds determine the poverty rate? And why is the functional poverty rate so much higher than that? Great technical question. So the federal government tracks the poverty rate through a pretty simple three step process. First, they develop a baseline poverty threshold. Then they alter that threshold based on the number of income earners and children in a family. And finally they compare a given family's net earnings to that adjusted threshold. The government actually keeps three different poverty measures. The most common metric is the U.S. census Bureau's official poverty measure. To set the poverty line of the official measure, the bureau simply multiplies the cost of a simple diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation by 3. Then they adjust that threshold based on a family's makeup so you can see a link to that in today's episode description or newsletter. And then they compare it to a family's pre tax earnings. The percent of the population below the official poverty measure in 2023 was 11.1%. Since 2011, the Census Bureau has worked with the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate a more comprehensive supplemental poverty measure. That measure includes costs for food, clothing and shelter, including utilities from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, plus a modest amount for personal care, household supplies and non work related transportation, treating taxes and childcare as income deductions. And then it makes cost of living adjustments before comparing the sum to a family's earnings. Although the supplemental measure also considers assistance benefits from the government as income, the broader considerations for costs are usually larger, meaning more people fall under this poverty line. The portion of the population below the supplemental poverty measure for 2023 was 12.9%. Lastly, there is the Department of Health and Human Services, which keeps a federal poverty level, which is a simplified VERS version of the official level that determines who is eligible for federal health care programs. HHS released a table of simplified thresholds for family sizes, but does not release data on the percentage of households that exceed them. Now, as for the functional poverty rate, you're probably thinking of something used by NGOs to measure poverty. There is not one single functional poverty rate, but one of the most widely referenced of these measures is United Way's Alice, that's Asset Ltd. Income Constrained Employed in setting this measure, the United Way considers not just food, clothing and shelter, but childcare, education, transportation, healthcare and technology. With this much broader consideration, the United Way considers 42% of U.S. households to be below the ALICE threshold All right, that is it for your questions answered and my take. I'm going to send it back to John for the rest of the pod and I'll see you guys tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace.

John Law (32:49)

Thanks Isaac. Here's your under the radar story for today, folks. On Monday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced that British authorities had dropped their demand that Apple provide a backdoor to access US Users data in national security and criminal investigations. In January, the UK asked Apple to disable its most advanced encryption for information stored in its cloud services, later telling U.S. officials that they would only seek this data when investigating serious crimes such as terrorism and child sexual abuse. However, the Trump administration balked at the request, and Gabbard said dropping the protections would have encroached on American civil liberties. Bloomberg has this story and there's a link in today's episode Description alright, next up is our numbers section. There have been 16 commissioners in the history of the U.S. bureau of Labor Statistics. There have also been 10 acting commissioners who served between the departure of one commissioner and the appointment of another. In BLS history, the first BLS commissioner, Carol D. Wright, assumed the role in 1885. There have been six BLS commissioners who have served in the 21st century. The number of days between President Donald Trump's firing of BLS commissioner Erica McIntarfer and his nomination of E.J. antoni to replace her in the role of is 10. The number of times Antoni's academic work has been cited is one, according to Google Scholar. And the total number of times former BLS commissioner McIntarfer's academic publications have been cited is 1,327 and last but not least, our have a nice day story. In 2007, 4 year olds Ellie Coroner and Dawson Naylor were diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Both children were treated at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, with coroner's cancer going into remission in 2008 and Naylor becoming cancer free in 2010. After their recoveries, the two did not cross paths again until Naylor approached Coroner at an orientation event for the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. Both cited their childhood experiences as inspiring them to pursue medicine, ultimately reuniting them after 17 years years. CBS News has this story and there's a link in today's episode description all right everybody, that is it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, Please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, podcast membership, or a bundled membership that gets you a discount on both. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day, y'. All. Peace.

Isaac Saul (35:23)

Our Executive Editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul and our Executive Producer is John Lowell. Today's episode was edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will K. Back and Associate Editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead, Bailey, Saw Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. To learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@retangle.com.

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Isaac Saul (37:22)

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