‘So It’s Their Fault?’ Fox’s Bill Hemmer Challenges Kevin Hassett Blaming Jobs Report on BLS
Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer was skeptical of Kevin Hassett’s explanation of what has been described as a “brutal” August Jobs Report and revisions that emerged Friday morning.
It was the first such report since President Donald Trump controversially fired the chief statistician of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as the first report since a draconian tariff policy went into effect. Only 22,000 new jobs were added in August, less than half of the modest expectation of 75,000. Unemployment rose to 4.3%, the highest since the Spring of 2021, when the nation was still reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic and work shut down.
Hassett, who serves as the Director of the National Economic Council under Trump, appeared on America’s Newsroom and appeared to blame the poor numbers on the agency that released them, at least according to Hemmer, who wasn’t buying it.
“Go ahead and get your hot take,” Hemmer asked of his guest. “It’s not the number you wanted or expected. How come?”
“Right, well, one of the things we know is that they’ve been really at BLS struggling with bad response rates,” Hassett explained. “And Goldman Sachs put out a study yesterday that said that they’d been messing up the August seasonals so much that over the last 10 to 15 years they’ve tended to have to revise up the number by around almost 70,000 jobs when they get the new final surveys.”
“So it’s their fault?” Hemmer pressed, apparently not buying the spin.
“And so while I’m saying that this number, we expect this number will be revised up, that’s sped the pattern over and over,” Hassett explained. “And if that happens, that’ll be consistent with all the other indicators we’re seeing. Industrial production is at an all-time high. Capital spending is up 8% over the first half of the year after it being mostly flat under Joe Biden. And also within the jobs report we got today, there are a lot of really interesting and positive patterns.”
“Thing one is that all the job creation is private sector job creation. Government workers are actually, their employment declined by a hundred thousand. All of the job creation is native born workers, whereas about half of the job creation under Biden was foreign-born workers,” Hassett continued. “And so there are lot of real positive things to see. And the final thing is that the wage numbers are fantastic. The wage growth is almost at 4%. Which means that the typical wage earner in America right now has gotten a $500 raise already because of Donald Trump’s policies.”
Still skeptical, Hemmer pressed, noting, “The revisions for June and July, collectively, were lower. And you’re saying the revisions for next month will come back. We’ll see whether or not that’s the case.”
“Yeah, and there’s another big revision next week, but the point is that these numbers, the reason why they’re getting revised so much is that the numbers are based on surveys and people are kind of not filling out the surveys until the last minute, and so the share of surveys that have actually been filled out at the beginning of the month is way lower than it used to be,” Hassett explained.
Watch above via Fox News.
