On Friday afternoon, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump was angry that the Friday jobs report for July recalculated downward – by some 250,000 – the BLS’s initial estimates of employment for May and June.

Trump is right to complain that the BLS jobs numbers are less and less accurate over time and these bad estimates impair economic policy making.

But what we have here is the classic bias known as Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.”

The BLS’s jobs estimates are increasingly unreliable snapshots of what is going on in the real economy. The monthly revisions shoot up and mostly way down from the initial headline numbers more than ever.

A major reason is the response rate on the employer surveys is way down.

The Biden jobs estimates have ALREADY been revised downward by a gigantic 800,000 from the original monthly estimates, and our spies at the BLS tell us to expect further downward revisions of as much as 500,000 more phantom jobs. That would mean close to 1.5 million phantom jobs under Biden.

We hope the new BLS hire fixes the mechanics of job estimation so we get accurate reads in the months and years to come.