Shelly Lundberg

What to make of POTUS's attempt to fire the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)?

Let's run down what knowledgable people are saying...

White House economist calls for 'fresh set of eyes at the BLS' after weak jobs report | Fox Business Video National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett discusses the latest jobs report, the firing of the labor statistics chief and the consumer impact of tariffs on 'Fox News Sunday.'

Hassett went on TV and claimed you can’t trust the economic data anymore because all the recent revisions are partisan.
A bald-faced lie.
Every serious economist still in this administration should resign. They are actively underminding the US economy by lending their credibility to this horse****

Am Econ Assn speaks out about firing the #BLS Commish.

"It is standard practice for statistical estimates to be revised as [better] data become available. These revisions reflect the commitment of statistical agencies to accuracy, transparency, and methodological rigor--not failure or bias."

Firing the BLS Commissioner — the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality — is an authoritarian four alarm fire.

It will also backfire: You can't bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.

Truly begging reporters to understand how LLMs work even a little bit

ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds A new study has found that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT consistently advise women to ask for lower salaries than men.

Study finds A.I. LLMs advise women to ask for lower salaries than men. When prompted w/ a user profile of same education, experience & job role, differing only by gender, ChatGPT advised the female applicant to request $280K salary; Male applicant=$400K.
thenextweb.com/news/chatgpt...

He's right, and it's not just Brazil.

Around the world, at least 31 democratic leaders who committed similar crimes have been jailed or banned from office since 2010. The failure to hold Trump accountable in the US was a unique and systemic failure of our institutions and political culture.

A Murdoch-Vance conspiracy. Just what we need. The disconnect between this Epstein-Trump-WSJ-GOP-MAGA nonsense and the stories of individuals being brutalized by this regime is becoming unbearable.

Accountability was on the table this morning at the LAPD Commissioners Meeting today. The violent acts from LAPD upon civilians and press since June 6th has caused a massive uproar of lawsuits and hospitalizations and a demand that police records are exposed.

In two parts.

Part 1/2

waste, fraud and abuse

Further context: If you’ve never dealt with FEMA after a disaster I can tell you they answer within 30 seconds. No hold times. Real live wonderful people who help while you cry and can’t even figure out what questions to ask. They walk you through it all. Every call.

NOEM
STOLE THAT $
FOR ICE

On July 5, as floodwaters were starting to recede, FEMA received 3,027 calls from disaster survivors and answered 3,018, or roughly 99.7 percent, the documents show. Contractors with four call center companies answered the vast majority of the calls. That evening, however, Ms. Noem did not renew the contracts with the four companies and hundreds of contractors were fired, according to the documents and the person briefed on the matter. The next day, July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, or roughly 35.8 percent, according to the documents. And on Monday, July 7, the agency fielded 16,419 calls and answered 2,613, or around 15.9 percent, the documents show.

oh my god www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/c...

Congrats everyone, we now have 35% tariffs on Canada for no apparent reason

Real Men Burn Stuff The manosphere and the war on renewable energy

I'm on a mission to persuade economists to talk about masculinity, and I'm happy to see that Paul Krugman has obliged. paulkrugman.substack.com/p/real-men-b...

In the antebellum era, some states used mechanisms like “Certificates of Good Character” to make sure enslavers weren’t selling their problematic property. This is eerily similar to that process. Just substitute “deportation” for “selling down the river” and there you have it…

this entire thread is basically required reading for anyone who wants to talk about mamdani and identity

If there is one lesson to draw from the history of fascism in the interwar period in Europe, it is this:

Democracy falls if and when mainstream conservatives and centrist/center-right elites decide to make common cause with extremists because they consider the “radical Left” the more acute threat.

Note: I just subscribed to a couple more independent journalists and analysts after this. We will need them desperately going forward.

Did the Social Security Administration really send me this partisan, misleading email applauding the passage of a destructive piece of GOP-only legislation? Where am I living? What happened to the professional civil service that we all counted on? They won’t answer the phones but they’ll lobby?

Email from Social Security Administration saying "Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors." As if it were a MAGA campaign mailer.

More from Social Security making Trump talking points.

An email that appears to have come from the real Social Security administration.

Which until now had been considered a non-partisan federal agency.

Time for another look at 'The Origins of Totalitarianism.'

A good question many are asking. The rumor we’ve heard from the floor (just a rumor but it’ll pass the time) is that Mike Johnson isn’t allowed to release them for the night until Trump gives the ok

Speaker Johnson should just take the L on this vote. Most of America doesn’t want this bill to pass anyways. It’s it both the worst and most unpopular piece of legislation in modern history.

Indeed.

And as another night falls, don’t get me started on “This could only happen in America!” in response to a human achievement that could, indeed, have happened in many other places and often more easily.

Lisa Murkowski cements her legacy The "moderate" Republican bemoaned her "hard" decision-- but she took the easy way out

"I'm not sympathetic to Murkowski’s plight. I don’t empathize when she laments the difficulty of her vote. What she did wasn't difficult. You don’t get credit for doing the hard thing when you didn’t actually do the hard thing. If Murkowski wants sympathy, she should try doing something to earn it."

So if Mark Carney wants to say that Canada is the greatest nation on earth—sure. Watching DC and LA at the moment—I’m not going to argue with that.

But everyone in the world now knows that this position is vacant—America has abdicated.

Because “the greatest nation” always referred, not just to power, but to justice, equality, and fairness. America’s position on this front has always been questionable, but is no longer.

“This is the greatest nation on earth” is The American Boast. Other countries have just let it go with a shrug. Even if we disagree, no point in wrangling with the US over such nonsense. Let them preen.