He (publicly!) wants to mess with Official COVID death toll numbers.
He says ““When you test, you have a case. “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”
He moves goalposts from 15, to 30,000 to 200,000. Each higher number being an even “greater success.”
Now he has an advisor making the Sunday morning rounds to move the goalposts on unemployment numbers:
After CNN’s Dana Bash mentioned that the Congressional Budget Office predicted that unemployment could still be at 9% at the end of 2021, she asked Hassett whether it’s possible for the number of unemployment claims to remain in double digits in November.
“Yes, I do,” Hassett said, before quickly adding that he thinks “all the signs of economic recovery” will be “raging everywhere.”
[...]
Pressed again on whether unemployment claims will remain in the double digits by the time President Trump appears on the ballot in November, Hassett replied “yes” due to unemployment being “something that moves back slower” but that “it could be better than that.”
But are the most recent unemployment numbers (released two weeks ago) even accurate?
Shahar Ziv of Forbes Magazine says no.
Don’t Be Fooled By Official Unemployment Rate Of 14.7%; The Real Figure Is Even Scarier
Shahar Ziv — Contributor
If 14.7 percent unemployment is a “portrait of devastation,” then the real figure, which is closer to 20%, is a glimpse of economic cataclysm
14.7 Percent Unemployment Rate Underestimates Economic Reality
The main reason why the 14.7 percent figure is underestimating the true rate of unemployment is a quirk in the BLS methodology. In gathering data for the unemployment survey, interviews are conducted and individuals are classified as either employed, unemployed, or not in the labor force based on their answers to a series of questions. As Betsey Stevenson, who was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers as well as the Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, highlighted, there was incorrect classification of many individuals in April.
“Interviewers were told to classify people who were employed [but] absent from work due to COVID-related reasons as temporarily unemployed. Many did this incorrectly —
correcting for this error raises the unemployment rate to nearly 20%,” she explained.
“Incorrectly”
Well, here I am……………………….correcting it.
For the record.
The True Rate May Be Even Higher Than 20 Percent:
There are other reasons why the real unemployment rate may even be higher than the adjusted figure of 20%:
- Quickly Outdated Inputs
- BLS Revisions May Skew Higher The 14.7 percent unemployment rate is only a preliminary estimate. BLS will revise it twice before holding it constant until its annual benchmarking process to “improve its data series by incorporating additional information that was not available at the time of the initial publication of the estimates.”
It’s likely that every lie Trump has told since late January, was specifically to prop up the stock market. There is much evidence of this. From way back in February:
PUBLISHED TUE, FEB 25 2020
President Donald Trump is reportedly furious that stocks are plunging, believing that health officials’ warnings have spooked investors, The Washington Post reported Tuesday night, citing two people familiar with the president’s thinking.
The president has reportedly cautioned aides against forecasting the impact of the virus over fears that stocks could fall further, The Washington Post said.
Because how good (or bad) Trump looks, is his one and only concern.