Steve Mnuchin: ‘The Unemployment Rate Is Not Real’

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Breitbart:

During his confirmation hearing on Thursday, Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin said the unemployment rate reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not capture the reality of the conditions facing American workers.

 

Mnuchin’s widely-quoted comment was “The unemployment rate is not real,” but he doesn’t seem to have been questioning the validity of the statistics produced by BLS.

 

U.S. News and World Report, for example, swiftly accused Mnuchin of repeating a “claim that has rankled economists” about how “government statistics have been politicized and aren’t accurate,” but that’s not what Mnuchin said.

 

Rather, he made the case to Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) that the official unemployment statistics suggest the job market has healed to a degree most actual workers and job-seekers would disagree with, because there’s so much happening that isn’t captured by that narrow statistic.

 

There was a bit of ideological jousting in the exchange, as Cantwell was basically trying to push Mnuchin into saying his primary focus should be preventing another “major implosion” in the financial markets, while he galloped in the opposite direction and talked about President-elect Donald Trump’s commitment to the forgotten middle American.

 

Democrats want the 2008 financial crisis to be seen as an impossible, economy-defining challenge President Obama was still coping with on his last day in office. Mnuchin turned that around by talking about how the American workforce has suffered under Obama’s policies.

 

“Let me just tell you, from having traveled with the President-elect for the last year, I absolutely understand why he got elected,” Mnuchin said. “And that is because, as you point out, the average American worker has gone nowhere.”

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Fake statistics versus real people.