All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 4, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
23:12
BLS-Gate: Lies, Damned Lies, And (Government) Statistics

Is President Trump trying to manipulate Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs report? Probably. WIll he be the first president to attempt to manipulate government-created statistics to his own political benefit? Hardly! Also today: Trump looks at new tariffs on Canada. You'll never guess why.

|

Time Text
Rigging The Information 00:15:13
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today, we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you.
Happy Monday, Dr. Pong.
Oh, this is Monday.
Indeed, it is.
New week.
New week.
New problems.
Any new ideas?
We'll check the news.
We'll check the financial market.
Same old, same old, I'm afraid.
But it's different now because I think we're fast approaching much worse times.
And there's a simple message.
It's a wonderful message.
There's an answer to all this.
It could have and should have been prevented, this disaster waiting.
But even now, it's important because if we do really have gigantic changes coming from the loss of a financial sensibility and also because of the moral climate of Washington, D.C., that when the time comes when the chaos is there and there's total chaos in the inner city and a rebuilding comes, which is ongoing all the time,
this will hopefully offer an opportunity for us to get off this track of what's happened 100 years ago with this wild-eyed progressivism and wokeism that will go in a different direction.
So that, of course, has been my goal, and I'm sure you have shared most of all that.
But today, I want to just talk about another example of where we are morally and financially.
Because we have Trump in.
He's a revolutionary.
There's some things he does, a lot of things he dislikes that we agree with him on.
But sometimes the solutions aren't always that good from our estimation.
But there was somebody presenting false information from the government, if you can believe it.
You know, they were rigging the information.
It's something that I've always assumed the case.
I've trained myself to think that really special reports, whether it has to do with foreign policy and why we have to go to war or why we have to have a financial crisis and double the size of the money system and introduce all kinds of returns.
And when we looked at the scare tactics of COVID, but it turned out there's a lot of falsehood.
There's one thing about the COVID is people are waking up.
Not many people want to take the booster right now.
But the one thing that I want to concentrate on is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics that reports very important information said that the numbers are rigged and they're done politically, that they were kept low.
Unemployment was kept low for Biden and they've rigged them so they're high for Trump.
You say, well, that's terrible.
That shouldn't happen.
They shouldn't rig them.
But it tends to tends to just deceive because I don't know how the people who deal in billions of dollars, how they can rely on any of that information.
But I imagine most of them know it's false and they have to add that to a factor.
But anyway, they announced that this thing was, this thing was very, very bad.
And they caught them making it look like it hurt Trump.
You know, in theory, you know, they gave good numbers for Biden, bad numbers for Trump, and then they corrected the mistakes they so-called made and got rid of the bad stuff under Biden and was dumped on Trump.
And Trump, guess what?
Trump got furious.
He really is upset about this.
But he was upset enough that he fired the head of the Labor Statistics Commission because she was responsible for this.
But the big thing is dissecting this all out.
Do people and should people believe the government on statistics and on vaccines and on going to war?
Or should they always question it?
And how far along are we with the total destruction of the credibility of government?
We certainly have talked a lot about the loss of credibility of the reasons why we've had to go to war.
And you and I have talked and worked together.
Gee, I don't even know.
It could have been 20 years now.
And the goal was always getting information.
Why are we doing this?
And I came across an article just recently because there's an anniversary with the Gulf of Tolkien.
And that just, and that was really part of my waking up at the time, you know, on what happened.
And then as years grew, it was atrocious.
And yet, here we were many years later, and they were trying to get rid of that sentiment, negative sentiment for going to war.
So they decided that they had to get rid of that stuff that occurred under LBJ.
And Bush was supposed to take care of it.
And he did.
He wanted a war in the Middle East.
So what did he have to do?
Lie about it and all that nonsense.
But the lie now is something that is ongoing.
And I think there's an alternative.
This people might say, immediately say, Ron, you have to get this information.
But do you think it could possibly be more accurate if it was left to the free market than it would be to have the bureaucrats and the politicians send out this very vital economic and foreign policy information?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, another one of his really increasingly frequent tantrums, Trump went ballistic on Friday, I think it was when these numbers came out, and they were lower than he expected, and he flipped out.
And let's look at a couple of the things that he said.
You can tell how frustrated and angry he was if you put that first one up.
He did a few of them.
I won't do too many, but actually, if you go to the next one, and let's put that one up.
That's the full one.
I was just informed that our country's jobs numbers are being produced by a Biden appointee, Dr. Erica McIntarfer, Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the job numbers before the election to try to boost Kamala's chances of victory.
This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated jobs growth in March 2024 by 818,000.
And then right again before the election, this is exactly what you were just saying, Dr. Paul.
These were records.
These were records.
No one can be that wrong.
We need accurate jobs numbers.
I've directed my team to fire this Biden appointee immediately.
This is one of those things.
This is why it's, I think, an attractive topic for us, for you, Dr. Paul.
Because on the one hand, you have Republicans saying, this woman is cooking the books.
She's a Biden appointee.
She's faking this.
And then you have the Democrats saying, oh, she's a selfless public servant.
How dare you say that?
And the fact is that both sides are wrong.
And the truth is what you just said, what Austrians would say, what free market people would say, why do we have government agency collecting this information in the first place?
It's not that one side's biased and one isn't.
It's why are we doing it all?
You know, the articles were coming out and the regular media talked a lot about that and it was all politicized.
But the one that I got a kick out of it, same old stuff.
But the first article, these were reported on Zero Head, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they told what was going on and that Trump was upset.
A few hours later, they had an update.
Trump re-rages that rigjum report.
So it was on and on.
And who knows what will come of this, but I don't think they'll look at our suggestions for the changes that they need.
But, you know, people would say, how would you ever get started?
Who would start it?
Who would give us this information?
And, you know, we have a friend that's in the business of trying to do this for years.
Matter of fact, he came to the banking committee at my request one time.
And he's a very, very honest person.
And his outfit is called, you know, Reagan, not Reagan, the Shadow Statistic, to do his own statistics.
And they're great.
And I want to remind me, it's John.
John Williams, yeah.
John Williams.
But it's available.
It's available right now to correct it.
And I'm sure there's a lot of people do that.
But somebody should look up John Williams.
Shadow Stats is great.
It's one of those other things where they say, Dr. Paul, well, if we didn't have the income tax, who's going to build the roads?
We had plenty of roads before we had the income tax.
You know, they were just flying.
If the government's not going to collect these statistics, well, who would?
Well, people like John Williams, who has no interest in cooking the books at all.
He has interest in shining the light on the truth.
Yes, all he wants to do is have credibility.
And I think all this put together, you know, whether it's wars and whether it's, you know, COVID or whether it's this type of economic rigging, I don't think people have thought much about rigging the information and economics, but it's been around a long time.
But what it does, just like they're admitting now, that people, you know, don't want to take the boosters, you know, COVID.
So the people do wake up, and we do have some information.
We do have an internet, even with its shortcomings, gets information out.
But when the message is so powerful, it's telling the truth, people are recognizing that.
So I think this is the best break that one can put on this system because we can't wait.
It's sort of like the Department of Justice.
We know there's a little rigging in DOJ.
So are we going to wait until that whole system is revamped?
No, but the people can wake up.
And the main thing is, who are the thought leaders?
Who are the people who are going to send out the message?
Who will be, we want to change the educational system.
We work on that.
But that is a delay.
I think it's popular opinion, and we should look at the system that there are opportunities.
It's getting harder and harder to sort out the truth from fiction on the internet.
But it's out there.
But people have to find individuals they can trust, and then they can go to them for information to help clarify the situation.
And you started out with a great point, Dr. Paul, where you talked about other things that are rigged.
Our foreign policy is rigged.
The Pentagon is rigged.
We don't know where the money went.
We didn't know what they're doing with the money.
Russia Gate is rigged.
We know that too.
You know, everything is rigged.
The government is in the business of rigging things.
And the sooner people wake up to that fact, then we can actually start toward healing and fixing these problems.
Yes, and that's the whole thing.
People say, well, you don't have a whole lot of trust in government at all.
No, we don't.
But that's healthy.
But the big problem, though, is delivering the authority to the government.
You know, it's pseudo-legal, you know.
But they fail a couple.
Not even the strong hints of the Constitution on how we should behave, but also thinking about natural law.
You know, the natural law has been around as long as people have been around.
And you're not supposed to lie.
You're not allowed to cheat.
You know, not allowed to go to war and kill millions of people.
You're not allowed to bomb people and boycott food going to kids.
You know, you're not allowed to do that just with common decency.
You don't need government for that.
We need to get the government out of the way of producing the conditions that cause all these problems.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Zero Hedge points out the irony in an article that they ran over this, points out the irony because on the one hand, you have Trump fuming.
He's furious at these rigged reports.
And at the same time, and I don't have it here in front of me, but he mentioned Jerome Powell too in one of his tirades.
He didn't say it this way, but he's next.
He's going to get it too.
But the funny thing is, now, if you go to that chart that we have, the funny thing is this bad labor report that came out, if you can put that chart up, there we go.
The irony, they say, of course, the great irony in all this is that the market is giving Trump exactly what he wanted, a rate cut.
And if you look at the rate cut odds after that quote-unquote rigged job report came out, they went up to 90%.
The market is believing 100% that Trump's actually going to get what he wants, which is a rate cut based on these bad stats.
And I think it points out, it underscores what you've always pointed out, which is that Trump is between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, he wants these low rates, but on the other hand, you have all of these other related problems.
You mentioned the bond market and other things.
This is unfixable.
Yeah, and that is the next step.
You see this, and Trump's happier because he's going to get his rate cuts.
But he never says, you have to swallow it, folks.
We do this.
How do you think we do this?
We do it by printing a heck of a lot of money, and then the interest rates go down, and it causes inflation, but we can live with a little more inflation, you know, and prices.
So it's on and on.
How are we going to police the world?
How can we build these weapons?
We're running out of weapons.
We're policing the world.
We're running out of weapons.
We're running out of money.
So they think that printing currency at the Federal Reserve and Treasury is going to be a substitute for earning real wealth because the real wealth is being consumed.
They're talking about, you know, revaluing gold and spending that money on some nonsense and hoping that their investments will solve the problem of the bankruptcy.
Tariffs and Their Consequences 00:03:07
But what is so disappointing to me is it's not like people don't know or can't know.
It's that either they've been denied the chance and they're not.
I think one vacuum there is out there and one thing that I think helps the people who are looking at this is curiosity.
Sometimes people on average, they're not curious enough to say what prices are going up.
But do they really want to know why prices are going up?
Oh, you mean to say that when we get food stamps, it's a contribution.
Do you mean to say that when we satisfy certain special countries around the world and spend money, that that's why your grocery bills go up?
See, they don't get that message.
And it's so, I think it's so clear-cut.
And they might turn on it, Ron.
You're just too naive.
You have to have a lot of, you have to have a, you don't have a PhD in economics.
That reminds me of a silly story.
The first time I ever campaigned for anything, I was talking about economics.
And somebody called in and said, you don't even have a degree in economics.
And somebody else called in, thank goodness.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Well, we should move on, I guess.
Just do a couple of one other thing, really, and this has to do with another Trump kind of meltdown, which he seems to have a lot of.
He needs to really take it easy.
Someone needs to take his phone away.
But go ahead to that next one.
This is from anti-war.com.
Dave DeCamp wrote it up.
Trump threatens a trade deal with Canada over its plan to recognize a Palestinian state.
And here's what Trump said: Wow.
Canada has just announced it is backing statehood for Palestine.
That will make it very hard for us to make a trade deal with them.
Oh, Canada.
So what he's saying, and I don't know if he understands this or realizes this, Dr. Paul, what he's saying is that these tariffs, these tariffs and these trade deals that he's making with other countries, on the one hand, he says, well, this is for our economic benefit.
But he actually revealed what it's really about.
It's all about politics.
If you're a country and you do something that we don't like, we're going to slap tariffs on you.
We're going to do things to hurt you.
And that just shows that the tariffs are the new sanctions.
That's what they become.
They become sanctions.
So this idea of punishing Canada because it's decided to do something about the slaughter in Gaza underscores the fact that these are political.
This is not about restoring manufacturing capability to the U.S. That's what they claimed.
No, it's about politics.
I think individuals who take that type of a policy are short-sighted because they can take an event and say, oh, you know, lower interest rates would help.
Maybe somebody that, because that contributes to higher home prices.
And the home prices, you know, homes aren't being built.
This would help the housing industries.
Politics Over Profit 00:04:42
So we'll lower it.
And then they stop flat there.
And then they never look at the malinvestment and how many houses are built and where will it go and will it go to a government project?
All these things.
They're very, very narrow-minded rather than looking at ramifications.
And it's not hard to figure out where's the competition.
It's authoritarianism versus personal choices, freedom.
And the founders understood this, and they voted for, and the best effort they could make was to let individuals have their freedom to make these decisions.
But today we don't have much of it.
We live in an age where the purity of democracy, the dictatorship of the majority, and all the special interests ganging up on the minority.
And if you look at it, who's suffering the most from our economic system?
Who suffers the most from war?
You know, starving babies and the whole work.
And what do you mean, starving babies?
Well, you know, starving babies around the world and the killing of civilians has been a result of our misuse of our idea that we were supposed to be the policemen of the world because it doesn't work.
It usually does the opposite.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I'm going to close out, Dr. Paul, if you don't mind, and put on that very last, because you mentioned freedom, and I got triggered when you mentioned freedom.
Put that last clip on if you can.
This is, and I've talked about it last week, but here is a great graphic that friends of ours made up.
Judging Freedom live on stage.
Blueprint for Peace Conference, August 16th, Washington, D.C.
Yes, indeed, Dr. Paul, we're going to have a show within a show.
Judge Napolitano, as I wrote to our subscribers yesterday, if you subscribe to Ron Paul Institute Updates, you would know this already, gave me a call a while ago and said, hey, here's an idea.
Why don't we do something on stage with my Judging Freedom program?
Because you have several of the regular, leave that up if you don't mind, several of our regular guests on your stage for the conference.
Why don't we just do a Judging Freedom?
So that's what we decided to do.
So we will live stream Judge Napolitano, who, as you know, is on our board, and he will be interviewing Colonel Doug McGregor, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Max Blumenthal, and Anya Parimpil, all four regular guests on the Judge's show on stage.
So if you like the judge and you like his show, you can actually see him doing it live.
And I'll put a link in here where you can get those tickets now while they are still available to watch these and many other great speakers at our conference.
Over to you, Dr. Paul.
Very, very good.
And you know, another thing that's happening today in the world that I see as optimistic is that the change in attitudes, whether it has to do with war or whether it has to do with government lying or whatever, I think it's the weakening of the philosophy of wokeism because more and more people, and if people say, oh, this is tearing the Democratic Party apart, they don't know what to do.
And it's even into the advertisement.
It's really pretty silly that, but I think it's wonderful that some of this silly stuff, this polygenderism and all the nonsense that goes on.
And they've worked it into investments.
And the companies say, well, you can't do this and the advertisement.
And people finally got sick and tired of it.
I don't think they ever liked it.
They were too quiet, but they're not quiet anymore.
And the door's been open to ignoring or pointing out how ridiculous some of this stuff has been.
So I think that we live in interesting times.
I think there's still some freedom left out there.
I think there's a good remnant of people building and especially on economic policies.
There's a lot more people today who know about and understand Austrian economics and sound money than there were 30, 40 years ago.
Even though to some degree, even the founders understood a better system than we have today.
But right now, I think there's a lot of things going on that will set the standard for a prevailing attitude that this is enough.
This is enough.
And I think part of Trump's success in the last election is representative that there's some rough edges that we like to talk about and make sure we stay on track.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
Export Selection