Unemployment ''Truthers''

Bruce Bartlett:

Donald Trump and Other Republicans Are Unemployment “Truthers”, The Big Picture: Among Donald Trump’s stump sound bites is that the national unemployment rate is far, far higher than the official rate of 4.9 percent. He is not alone in making such claims. Both former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who dropped out of the presidential race last year, and retired surgeon Ben Carson have repeated this claim during this election cycle. Its origin dates back to the 2012 election when many Republicans believed that Barack Obama had ordered the Bureau of Labor Statistics to report a much lower unemployment rate in October, just before the election, than seemed plausible. It also feeds into a growing distrust for government statistical data that parallels a denial of scientific facts such as climate change.

The first to make an explicit conspiracy charge was former GE CEO Jack Welch...

The reason people like Trump can get away with making up numbers and making baseless charges is because many Americans are receptive to his message. An August 2014 survey found that on average people thought the unemployment rate was 32 percent rather than the official rate of 6 percent.

But even numbers people who should know better have made absurd claims about the unemployment rate and other government data. The CEO of Gallup, Jim Clifton, called the official rate “misleading” and implied that the White House has engaged in manipulation. Former Reagan Office of Management and Budget Director Dave Stockman, who now peddles conspiracy theories for almost everything, also claimed that the true unemployment rate was 43 percent in June 2015. Billionaire investor Paul Singer, a big Republican Party contributor, has said that virtually all government data, including the inflation rate, are faked and unreliable.

Why Republicans seem so willing to believe statistical nonsense as well as conspiracies about Obama’s birthplace and global warming is unclear. But there is no doubt that it is extensive and seemingly immune from refutation.

[There is quite a bit more in the original post.]