By Nick Koutsobinas
Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., expressed his skepticism to Newsmax on Wednesday that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had for months erred in projecting positive job numbers in the run-up to the November election.
On Aug. 21, as the prospect of a new administration looms, the BLS said it missed the mark on job number reports by 818,000 — in the private sector. There was no error in reporting the number of government jobs.
Marshall told “Carl Higbie FRONTLINE” that the BLS report “is yet another reason why Americans don’t trust government.”
“Like you said,” Marshall told host Carl Higbie, “there’s no way that this is just a mathematical error — a statistical improbability. You could see missing by 5%. But here we are, just what, 70-some days before the election and they’re off 30%.”
“They dropped the numbers from 3 million to 2 million new jobs. Look, we have 1.6 million less full-time jobs today than a year ago. We need to be talking about full-time jobs,” the senator added.
“Why is this important? Don’t you think if [Federal Reserve Chair Jerome] Powell was sitting there trying to figure out where to set the Fed rate, he saw these soft numbers three months ago, that maybe he would have dropped the interest rate a little bit sooner and bring that home?”
The congressman went on to state that in his community, people aren’t buying homes because the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve are “so high.”
“So this has a huge impact,” Marshall concluded, “and certainly impacts everybody’s everyday lives. This economy is much softer than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris want to let on.”