“Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration and its Republican acolytes seized on the figures to boast about Trump's economic policies,” Hiltzik writes in the Tribune National. “White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett proclaimed the inflation figure to be ‘an absolute blockbuster report,’ and described the GDP figure as ‘a great Christmas present for the American people.’
After being hounded by bad numbers for most of Trump’s first year, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) happily jumped aboard, announcing "America is winning again" after the GDP report. He even called it "the direct result” of congressional Republicans’ and President Trump’s policies.
“Um, not so fast,” said Hiltzik, pointing out that the 43-day government shutdown from Oct. 1 to Nov. 12 was the most important cause of gaps in the collected data for the consumer price index calculation.
“You've got to take it with a grain of salt," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG US, of the inflation report. "It's confusing and it doesn't quite square with prices that we've observed."
Swonk said Trump’s steep cutbacks at the BLS had already reduced the staff assigned to sampling prices by 25 percent. That prompted the agency to substitute "imputed" numbers in lieu of hard data.
"Those cases can show up as zeros in the percent change of the release," Swonk wrote, which lowers the bottom-line figure. In fact, a sampling scheduled for mid-October had to be canceled, so figures dating from August were used instead. This conceals any price increases in subsequent months.
“A major problem concerns housing costs, which account for about one-third of the data inputs for the (Consumer Price Index),” Hiltzik reports. “Because the BLS was unable to collect rental data for October, it implied that the monthly change in rents was 0 percent in October — further skewing the reported CPI lower. Experts say it will take at least six months to use newly collected data to provide a reliable estimate of housing inflation.”
The delay in sampling, Swonk said, means some seasonal price phenomena, such as airfares, also went unreported. The originally scheduled sampling would have incorporated a pre-Thanksgiving run-up in fares, but by the time the data were collected fares had returned to a non-holiday level.
On top of this, Hiltzik says economists are warning “that some economic factors haven't yet fully played out.”
“That includes Trump's tariffs, which in their execution have been lower than they appeared on the surface, and higher healthcare premiums, which have been forecast or announced but won't actually become effective until 2026.”
Read the full report at this Kansas City Star link.
